Why Do I Write?

A dear friend who is undaunted by mounds of laundry and chaos and paperwork and details, who sews and makes things with her hands and calls it "simple," does not understand how in the world, with all the health battles, pain, and hurdles of life, I "find time" to write.

I write because I cannot help it. I write because it keeps me sane. I write because to me, it is the easiest thing in the world. There are, at any given moment, twenty blogs lined up in my brain like race horses at the gate. When someone asks what I wish to write about next, I freeze. If I even try to open that race-gate, all twenty will come roaring out, and how, oh how to let out only one? Speech becomes labored. Writing is all ease and easy and therapy and is no yoke at all.

Laundry. Cooking. Details of paperwork. Doing. Those were familiar friends of a younger era, easy hurdles. Now, this mama gets overwhelmed by muchness. She craves zen. Objects overstimulate. Simple tasks overwhelm. But writing is like breathing. It cannot help but happen, and if too many days go by without the outlet, the mind gets clogged with racehorses foaming at the gate, adrenaline overloading.

In Shadowlands, a movie about C.S. Lewis, love, loss, unanswered questions, and pain being God's megaphone, a line is said that I like to ponder. "We read to know that we are not alone."  For me, a shy, introvert-- reading and writing have always been safe friends. And I have come to accept that I was wired thusly. I embrace it. I no longer need to fight and prove wrong the accusations of high school friends that I am stuck up. No, I was never stuck up. I was painfully shy. I over-analyzed my every social move. Yes, a cheerleader, yes a clarinetist in the band, yes a chamber choir alto, irritated by every lacking intonation. Sensitive. Not built for muchness outwardly. Built for muchness inwardly. I cannot swim in busyness. I drown. Race horses run in my mind and must be tended, fed, groomed and cared for. This much production requires quiet. Requires vast expanses of empty spaces in which to graze, ponder, chew.

His yoke's anointing broken, we swam the waters of busyness in young parenting and ministry. Yet now my body pays. Tis true, pain is a megaphone. I did not listen to it's sound. I could not bear the message I believed that it was saying: 'You're insufficient. Not enough.' But I misheard. It's message loud and clear was that this world requires entire alphabet; but Father God requires only A and B: "Fear God, and keep His commandments. For this is the whole duty of man." Simplicity. Serenity.

While God knit baby girl inside my womb He also whispered clear instruction: a passage in Isaiah. "He gently leads those who are with young." He wanted me to know the difference between His voice, and the voice of the church where we served.

Years later, He spoke to me, "You have been wounded in My house, but not by Me."

It settled and unwound inside my soul for all this time, until one night I lay under the stars upon my children's trampoline. He gentlemanly escorted me through time from my beginning, and showed me one by one, the wounding I had borne. Before, I did not see it. Just thought I was not worth it. My "stop that" had been broken. The walls torn down, unguarded.

And one by one He showed me He was there, had not forsaken. This megaphone of pain exists in purpose quite Divine. In wounding, came His healing. And I live to pass it on.

"See? I am making you a wall," He said. And so He has.

written 17 November, 2013, Kelly Stack Scott