The Words I Live, Not the Words I Write

Just thinking about blogging. Thinking how it may seem to readers as an attempt to self exhalt, an attempt to magnify the blogger. I certainly do not want it to be an attempt to magnify me.

When I first started this back in February, I really started it because I was spurred on by something I read on Ann Voskamp's website and by my yearnings to once again be a journal-er, as in years gone by. (It really is so much easier to type my thoughts than to hand write them.) I want to chronicle my thoughts, not because my thoughts are important, but to see God working in my mind and heart. It really is therapeutic to write out prayers, thoughts, musings of the heart. I have enjoyed journal-ing again. It has brought clarity to things that God has been working out in my heart and it ends up causing me to think more on those things throughout the day. It brings it home a little more. I find that I am meditating on what God is teaching me. And when I see things in writing, I don't know, I just like it. Plus I like to be able to go back and see and recount all that the Lord has in His grace and mercy been doing in my life.

But blogging is a little more than a journal, because it is a journal that everyone can read. And futhermore, for me, often I post what I have written on facebook. Do I do that so that people will read about me and think, wow, that is good? Or man she really knows something? Or she's got something to say? While of course in my pride, I cannot say that I would not like it if someone enjoyed what I wrote or was happy with what they read. But the real reason I share is not to magnify me, but to magnify the One Who is in me. I share what He is teaching me, my failures, my weaknesses, the things I am learning, for one purpose and that is to encourage. To let my friends and readers know that there is nothing uncommon with what they are struggling with, because I or some other person is struggling with that too. It is so fun for me to be able to say, "look what a wretch I am!" and "look what God can do in a wretched life, with a weak person!", "look how good my God is, look what He does, look at the joy He brings, look at Him!"

I like writing and sharing, but writing in this form is not necessarily a strength for me, though many words flow, they are not eloquent nor lovely. But they are from the heart, a heart that knows that I am wicked, that I am nothing, that I need more of Him and less of me. Let that be my aim in blogging: "More of Him, Less of Me!" And really, what I write means nothing, if in fact I don't live it! So in the words of Ann Voskamp's "Blogger's Prayer,

"May the only words that matter in my life, not be the words I write on a screen~~but the ones I live with my skin" ~A.Voskamp