On Blogging, Perseverance, and Grace

To be quite honest, I seriously considered deleting this blog for a while. Admittedly, I don't even know how to do that, but I've thought about it long enough to have gone through the deleting process several times over.

Actually, to be even more honest, I'm still considering it. For starters, I barely, if ever, post; hardly anyone ever reads, and I have done next to nothing to change that. Also, I'm not crazy about much of what I've written in this little corner of the web. Truth be told, my blog usually feels rather uncomfortable to me, and I think that comes across in what I write. Mostly, that stems from my own insecurities about writing and the knowledge that other people from various walks of my life will read my words. Talk about two of my biggest struggles - pleasing people and doubting my own abilities - combined into one! Add to that combination a hectic schedule and far too many thoughts not worth posting online, and the result is this blog.

As you can probably tell, that jumble of thoughts has swirled through my head for a while now.

Yet for some reason, I haven't deleted this little web address. Instead, I'm here, writing this post.

I'm writing it for several reasons: I'm stubborn; I refuse to let something simply die; I'm still holding out hope for this unfortunate little blog of mine; and most importantly, because I want to claim my story.

The thought of killing a blog cold bothers me. Doing that would feel like a miserable failure on my part, letting an endeavor end because I couldn't keep up with it. Really, by this point in my life that shouldn't even cause me a second thought, because I have let go of quite an assortment of failed endeavors over the years. Recently, though, situation after situation has shown me time and again how I still don't handle my own mistakes well. (Add that to my personal checklist of top priorities to work on this year.) Of course, a huge factor in why I don't like this blog is that to me it feels like a big poster displaying my mistakes and immaturities over the past couple years, in everything from silly, picky requests to overly pretentious statements I always seem to veer towards even when I don't intend to!

Yeah, I admit, there's also this part of me dreaming that one day I'll be some good ol' blogger who consistently posts things "worth" reading about all aspects of life... even when all sound reason warns me that will probably never happen. This post doesn't play into that imagined ideal, though. What I'm writing here stands independently of whatever future blogger or non-blogger I may become. This post matters because of that last reason, the crucial one, the one driving this post.

I want to claim my story.

In twenty years, I want to look back at my life and say, "Yeah, that's me." The girl who adored her siblings, stressed over school, loved to dance, enjoyed learning from Kindergarten through twelfth grade (despite years of getting teased), reacted in anger, planned movie nights, sought the people normally left out, worked slowly, reveled in stories and make-believe, was a hybrid home-public-schooler, treasured toddlers in her lap, talked too much and too bluntly, read the dictionary for fun, got distracted, quit piano lessons in high school and regretted it every day but never took it back up, considered Sherlock Holmes her superhero, preferred the 1800's to the modern age, and could sit for hours watching the dawn turn to morning while the birds pecked for worms beneath her window. That is me.

I'm not proud of every item on that list. I would do much differently if I could, but for each fact listed above and many more - they're all my story, every last piece of it. It's a tapestry of failures dyed in a deep, red blood of grace. At the end of my life, I want to look at my story spread in front of me and take it all for what it is. I don't want to hide from the parts I don't like or try to rip them out of the fabric, because heaven knows I can't. Instead, I want to have a vision clear enough to see the way each bump in the weave creates a bigger pattern, one that holds my name in every piece of thread and tells the glory of a God who has allowed every moment of my life to be exactly as it was and is.

To look at eternity, there's more than one vantage point. Certainly, I need to remember the one that will come at the end of my life, but there's more than that. There's now. The place I'm in right here at this moment also holds a window into eternity. When I see the bumps of my mistakes and failures, not just in twenty years but right now, I want to learn to really believe that they belong to a beautiful pattern, and scramble past that bump quickly to find what happens beyond it. I want to keep going so that one day I can have a tapestry as long as possible, long because every extra inch of thread means a moment of life fully lived. Yes, that means there will be far more bobbles and twists along the way, but I know that the God who created me is more than capable of weaving all the strings into a single, complete fabric, perfectly woven by a master Weaver.

At the end of it all, I want to find this: victories and vices alike covered in a beautiful, scandalous grace.

If you ever check this link again and find the address gone, you'll know I changed my mind. We'll realize together that this blog of mine with all its quips and quirks was a lost cause, and it wouldn't be the first or last one in my life.

Right now, though, the blog's still here. I'm still me. The words are still up. And every bit of it forms part of my story, so I'm not giving up on it yet.