faith to fly.

It's no secret I'm absolutely terrible at keeping up with the blog. A few of you wonderful people have poked and prodded at me to write, which really has been encouraging. So thank you! But to be entirely honest, I've been struggling with it. I've been quietly wondering about the purpose of this little online journal, about my focus here, my motivations. In my first post, I expressed similar sentiments, but decided to take the plunge anyhow, and I really am glad I did. But I think it's natural to reconnect with and reevaluate your motives every once in a while, and I suppose that's been the sound of my silence.

I love me a good, "everyday-life" kind of blog. I read Kelle Hampton so often she feels like a friend (Pathetic? Perhaps.), and my real best friend, Heather, and I recently joked about how reading those blogs is a little like reading People magazine. Once you start, you just can't stop. It's addictive. Like crack for the stay-at-home-mom or procrastinating student! The reason I started "in search of words", however, wasn't so much to document my everyday activity, as it was to stay accountable to my passion. To share some of the thoughts and musings swirling around in my head. To maybe validate someone, nurture someone, encourage them and point to Light. I suppose that writing, for me, has always been about self-expression and the freedom that accompanies that -- but it's also an offering. A way to worship a God who's instilled in me a passion for weaving words together to (hopefully) form something beautiful.

Have you ever read Madeleine L'Engle? She wrote a wonderful book called Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, which I highly recommend if you're artistic or creative in any way. She writes this beautiful account of how her faith and her art of writing are innately interconnected; how, like life, creating is a risk, an act of faith. The book is filled with some great parallels and metaphors, but one idea in particular that spoke to me years ago when I read it still speaks to me today: You must serve your art. A profound little sentence with so much meaning.

And what does it mean? For me, when I think of serving my art, I think about honouring, respecting, and trusting it. Honouring my writing enough to try my best. Respecting it enough to not put it down if it isn't shaping up to be what I want it to be in the moment. And trusting that maybe, just maybe, the sometimes long and arduous process of creating is worth the time and the risk.

I'm a perfectionist, often too hard on myself. What if the point of all this is to learn to trust? To offer up, in faith, that part of myself that loves to create, and just let it be what it's meant to be? We all have gifts that are meant to be given, and I think at some level, we're all just a little bit of afraid of what might happen if we give those gifts away. But I truly believe that God wants us to live in freedom, wings out, confident that we are valuable as we are and empowered to make a mark on our little corner of the earth. It really does take faith to fly, doesn't it? With that renewed sense of purpose, I think I'll keep on sending up my offering and let God do with it what He will.