bloodteethandflame

I have been wanting to write and I promised to write – it was the reason for this month’s writing project (which was not so playfully named ‘Keeping it 100’*) – but as you might notice, I haven’t been keeping up with it this particular July/Month for Loki.

There are reasons, and I am trying to decide if I really want to get into all of them, because Heaven knows, I had plenty that I’d planned to write about, plenty that I’d promised to write about.

It’s more serious than usual in that not only had I promised myself that I’d carry the project through the whole month, I promised Him that I’d write about these topics and that I would carry it through by writing in this blog every day for a month.

We struck a deal of sorts, and I reneged in the sense that I did not follow through on my part.

I had promised to tell a story that I have not told.

It’s not that I had a shortage of posts, or that I never intended to tell the story.  As a matter of fact, I have enough posts sitting in draft as well as several other posts written that only require that I cut and past them from the file folder on my laptop where I’ve stored them.  They are in order, as I had planned.

You see, it is not that I stopped writing.  It is that I did write but I refused to post, and that was what I promised Him that I wouldn’t do.  I promised Him that I would share as much of the story as I could, no matter how uncomfortable things got, no matter how controversial the topics were….and yet…

I have not.

So what happened?

I got sick around the 15th of the month, as I may have mentioned in several of my latest posts.

A few of my friends pointed out that if I hadn’t been keeping up with my writing, of course that was understandable.

If I was ill – and I still am recovering from that double ear infection and sinus infection – that it stood to reason that I should rest and recuperate.

Several opined that I was being too hard on myself to think that He wouldn’t understand, that He would insist that I write anyway.

But I wrote every day.  The writing is not the hardest part.  It has never been the hardest part.   He knew (just like anyone else who knows me well) that the purpose of the project had nothing to do with a writer’s block or an inability to express myself.

In essence, what He asked for was that I stop censoring myself; that I stop hiding – privatizing posts, or posting my thoughts in my less-frequented blog.  He was asking for me to make my writing entirely public and highly accessible, to post ‘where it counts’ meaning where people could see and respond to my thoughts if they so chose.

He wanted me out of my comfort zone.  It was an exercise to force me out of my social anxiety.

And so, He wanted me to stop keeping secrets, to be authentic and unashamed of who I am and what I am and what I do — for one month.

Just for one month, and then I could go back to ‘hiding’ if I so chose.

He didn’t care (because, if you know me, you know that I argued with Him) if ten thousand other people had written about such things ten thousand times before I wrote about them, before I would write about them.

He wants His people to express themselves fully, and He doesn’t care if you’ve all heard the stories before; He places great value on self-expression.

Perhaps it’s more than that: It’s about self-knowledge.  It’s about fearlessness.

He wants us all to tell our stories….or at the very least, be fearless and unashamed about telling our stories.

~~~

*Believe me, you have heard this story before:

And yet, you’d better believe He never gets tired of hearing that story.

~~~

So, as you might imagine, I haven’t any VALID excuses.