Facing the Night

A year ago this time, I'd been through two recent miscarriages and was struggling to make sense of them. One night, my husband let the kids loose in the backyard after dark and we ended up joining them. Somehow, that time became a release for me and that night, I sat down and wrote about it in a notebook. I found the entry a few months ago and thought it would be a good post for October, a sort of reflection on how far I'd come in a year.

Not long after finding that entry, my husband was diagnosed with cancer. A year ago we were running through a backyard on a strangely warm October night. This Tuesday, I went with my husband to get his first blood transfusion.

I still think about the darkness I wrote about in that entry, how it somehow felt safe despite the blackness around us. Maybe it was knowing we were protected by the fence line, hearing the laughter of my children, or letting go of the need to see everything. I don't know for sure.

But I have found that in this new darkness, I've felt a similar comfort. A sense of safety, and even though I can't always see it with my eyes, a very real presence of love. So here is my entry, and I hope you can find the courage to face your unknowns with the knowledge that everything you need can be found through our Savior, who is a light in every dark place.


October, 2016

The sky is dark at seven, wrapping around us, quiet and embracing. October shouldn't be this warm. But I'll take it. Halloween costumes donned, the kids race into the backyard. We finally have a use for the glowing pink and green pumpkin flashlights I bought last year. No pretense. No crowds. Just a fence on three sides. Even the neighbors feel distant, faded. Here is our rectangle of grass, our space, made intimate by night.

I follow them in circles, running, running. My husband joins us. Pumpkin flashlights turn wizard's wand and light saber. A strange battle ensues. Harry Potter meets Darth Vader while my son cries stupefy and expelliarmus. For the three year old, giants and monsters are still enough to satisfy her need for adventure, especially if I'm the monster.

We play and things slip away. Unburdened, I laugh freely for the first time all day. It seems my body is stronger without the weight of day. I run longer than before. It's beautiful, uninhibited.

Something is here in the darkness, strength, and joy and love, even though I cannot see. The light of my children, the light I carry, gleams even brighter against this blackness. Why have I been so afraid of the unknown? It's everything I need.

When I Decided to Stop Writing

I Will Make You Fishers of Men

  “So the core landscape of history has been sketched by the pen and brush and words of those who invoke a divine creator’s involvement in our lives and who count on the ligatures of religion to bind up our wounds and help us hold things together.” 
-Elder Holland, "Bond by Loving Ties," Education Week 2016

I woke up two Saturdays ago and for the first time in eight years, I told myself I didn’t have to keep writing. I didn’t have to keep doing this to myself.  The life-crippling anxiety over publication schedules and being good enough or having smart or clever enough ideas, the online marketing, the need to produce something worth reading and then edit it and edit it again, all that, I didn’t have to do.

I read some middle grade and high school entries for Reflections a few weeks ago. Holding their raw words in my hands, it was as if I juggled pieces of aspirations, wishes, and hopes. I didn’t want to put a ranked number on that. How could I tell the girl who so openly shared her experiences with sexual abuse, a drug-addicted mother, and cutting, all before age thirteen, that because she didn’t have as good a grasp on language arts as the other kids in her category, her story wasn’t going to make it beyond the library where I sat reading it?

Maybe that experience was a step to where I was Saturday morning, remembering writing as the gift that saved me, wishing to go back to that time when I wrote, not because I needed to share things inside myself, but because I needed to meet myself. When did I decide I had to share, and why, after so many years, had I never looked back? Why had I kept putting myself, my flaws, my failures, out there for everyone to see? Why had I decided this was something I had to do? 

I turned writing over inside me, and really imagined life without it. I wanted to ask God if maybe it was time to give it up. Was this what I needed to free myself from what I saw as a trigger for failure in other areas of my life? 

On Sunday, I read Elder Holland's talk, The First Great Commandment from October, 2012 about the Twelve Apostles after Jesus Christ’s death, resurrection and ascension. I read about them giving up and going back fishing, and how the Savior found them and called them to the work a second time. 

As I read, I realized I couldn’t give up writing, not if I truly loved my Savior. I sort of knew that all along. I just needed to be reminded.

Writing is and has always been, a way God uses me to reach other people and help them. We all have strengths, ways our talents can help others. As safe and reassuring as it sounded to retreat to that place where I could be alone with my writing again, it was too much like the man who buried his talent, too much like the Apostles going back to fishing.

With God it’s never about just one soul. We are all interconnected. God gives us gifts. Sometimes the ability to write, or draw, or sing. Sometimes He gives us experiences that teach us love, joy, hurt, pain, or empathy. We experience, create, grow, and then He sends us out to help each other.

The words those teenagers wrote have changed me, even if no one else ever reads them. Like the thirteen-year-old girl who's story I can't forget, I cannot reach everyone with my words. Sometimes my stories stop with one or two readers. Jesus Christ alone knows how to reach everyone, and He sends the right people out to bring someone to Him. Where I cannot not reach with my stories, someone else can reach with theirs.

God is not up there keeping track of my forgotten comas and misspellings. He’s not even recording a list of the plot holes or character issues I didn’t fix the way a better author might. He teaches me a step at a time. From the beginning, He’s been using all I can give him, and turning it to good in miraculous ways. Even if what I give is imperfect, His grace gets me to the places He wants me to go.

This is why I haven’t considered stopping before. I know what I have isn’t perfect. I know it’s limited and childish, and I still have so much to learn.

But it’s His.

My gift is His. I will do everything I can to do something good with it. I will walk through the hard stuff, the “tear it apart and write it again” stuff, the “oops, I can’t believe I missed that detail” stuff. I will keep learning, keep walking, and I won’t be afraid of the future I can’t see yet.

I’ll do it so someday, the door that will open to me will reveal a thirteen-year-old girl who doesn’t think she can make it one more day on her own. My written words will be the words that God plants in her heart. She will reach out and I will, in my flawed, limited, author-like way, put her hand in His.

I’ve been blessed by His love. I’ve been changed by Him. I won’t look back. I won’t quit. I will do it for her. I will do it for Him. It’s no longer enough to do it for me.