I’ve always wanted to be a writer. My dad is a writer. I love words. I say things best between me and a piece of paper (or a computer keyboard). I feel most alive after I have written a paragraph.
Being a writer has always felt like a lame cliché, a naïve dream that everyone wants in on. I’ve always had something to say. I’ve been created to say it through this medium. But struggled to find the courage.
A couple years ago, I launched on the World Race. The blog they invited me to keep was right in my wheelhouse. I loved sharing the stories and the struggles, the celebrations and the insights, I experienced on the mission field.
About a third of the way into my race, my world changed. Bigger than the experience of travel or ministry. My identity knocked at my door. I was extremely blessed by squad-mates who encouraged and challenged me to write. I wrote and I wrote. I wrote short stories about imagined adventures. I wrote vulnerably about the thoughts I was processing in real life. I tried to write weekly blogs to connect with my community back home and was shocked to see that my community was bigger than I knew.
During Month Five of my world race, I became a writer and have never looked back. I used to think to become a writer, I had to get published and make money. But a writer is just a person who writes everyday, regardless of how good it is, regardless of what others think about it. I’m really living my dream. A dream is simply the pinnacle of one’s identity.
The consistency of world race blogging, and the challenge of my squad mates to continue pushing into writing both fiction and non-fiction, has turned me from someone who wrote abashedly only when I felt like I would burst otherwise to someone who writes daily and freely. I’ve transformed into someone who writes to live rather than to keep from dying. Someone who has something to say and knows how to say it. A call finally answered.
Since I started blogging with the World Race, I have written seventy-six blogs. I checked last week and did some math. The average view count has been 4,482. That means that more than three hundred thousand times, someone has clicked on this page to read something I have written. In some ways, those are just numbers. But to me, they represent a cloud of witnesses, sharing in my journey (not just as a world racer, but as a writer). They are three hundred thousand blips of affirmation. They have helped get me to the point where I would write everyday the rest of my life, even if nobody else read a word.
As I think about squad leading, I hope I can share the encouragement that my squad shared with me. I hope I can help people see that living a dream is not about measurable success. It is about unrelenting, unapologetic obedience to the Voice inside. And the deep truth about how God-centered community can be an incredible catalyst for discovering identity.
Two years later, I am working on my second novel (last week a literary agent and a small publisher responded to my query and asked to view some sample chapters), continue to churn out blogs, and have sent off stories and devotionals to magazines and newspapers. I don’t overly care what they say in return.
I am a writer.
Thank you for your encouraging words, prompts, affirming clicks, feedback, and taking the time to read my heart.
