This was when I decided to begin blogging.
Unlike many others, I wasn’t trying to build a platform, nor was I
hoping to publish books, I was writing to save myself and any semblance
of faith I may have left. I wrote about what I knew best: faith, social
justice, culture, anything that was meaningful to me. But my blog wasn’t
an online journal where I vented my faith deconstructing angst, (I did
that with my husband—sorry honey!) it was where I practiced the craft of
creating words, weaving metaphors with anecdotes, lyrical phrases with
colloquial internet language. It was as if I had all this pent-up
negative energy brewing beneath the surface of my consciousness, and if I
didn’t channel it into beautiful eruption, it would destroy me from the
inside out.
It worked.
Writing is one of the most beautiful things
I have ever done. With my words, I have helped others articulate their
suffering, comforted the sick, advocated for the marginalized, and in
the process brought much healing to myself. In many ways I am still an
amateur, but I am starting to learn the truth of what many writers have
spoken of, that creativity is its own entity, a flitting muse who
sometimes hides even when we seek earnestly, with our heads banging
against the keyboard. It was Michelangelo who said that there was a
statue in every block of stone and the job of the sculptor is to find
it. The art of writing is similarly chipping away at unnecessary words
and stories to allow the elusive truths to emerge.
