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“I went back to my original intent and now it all makes sense. Do you hear that? It’s the sound of peace.” #writer #life #community

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I went back to my original intent with everything and now it all makes sense. Can you hear that? It’s the sound of peace. The sound of disclarity fleeing, life, vibrant and blowing.

All the things I tried to make it fell through, and I nearly lost my joy in a process of trying to create something deep, fulfilling and relational into an oiled, monetized machine.

And the pictures looked pretty but I lost community.

But it’s okay because all this only happened after I took two-year Sabbatical from regular writing on a blog, and I had to have that gap to not only heal from some things but also realize that I do hear from the Holy Spirit, I just had to learn He is ever so quiet and gentle compared to the clamoring world with all it “has to offer”.

What is the verse again? I don’t want to gain an entire world of things I don’t need and lose my soul in the process.

My original intent when blogging online in 2015 was to write through hard times because my husband had found a door open to his dream job, and yet I became wildly depressed.

It was no one’s fault, but I call it my wilderness experience where my family and I were not close as we are now, I was very much isolated while raising young children, but deep in my core I knew they needed to know Jesus, so I homeschooled and blogged, posting the photos I thought at the time to be extravagant.

And through this journal of hard days where I felt spiritually and emotionally pained yet numb, the darkness still did not win because I was pointed into the direction of a community I never would have thought could be mine, nor me a part of it.

This online place started here at WordPress as cookwipesweep.com and it morphed into faithadventures.me and then I learned I did not have what it took to mold my blog into spectacular for what my pocketbook could shovel out, so I eventually caved to another host only later to learn an invaluable lesson:

I beheld simplicity in the palms of my hands. But over time, I saw people transform what they loved into a career.

“Can I do that?”

I waded between waters. I tried this and tried that. No one was lost on my blog except me, because I became greedy trying to be someone I was not.

I traded what I had for an upgrade that offered everything, everything that is, except for tools of interaction.

The new shiny oiled blog was pristine but offered little to no customer service, and no simple options for others to participate, which is what a writing community thrives on.

For the memo, if you use Wix, that is great. It just didn’t fulfill for me.

Allow me to go on a writer-rant for a sec…

We know we don’t know it all.

We don’t have to undergo lectures on this.

We just want to get the words out because it’s how we process our thinking, so it only sounds like overthinking if we try to say it to you verbally rather than write it down (unless you are a speaker who writes – put your hand down, haha), because if we wrote it down first, we could edit it. Then you’d get the final draft, slimmed down, suited to your timetable.

A writer’s community, especially a blogger one, is one of slow-living-people. Yes, we know YouTube is all the rage. I just watched gardening videos earlier. I had to. I am educating myself.

We know we are a visual people and that statistics say the attention span of a human has shrunken down significantly from where it was prior to Netflix. Thank the Lord we left that land years ago…

We know this, but we do not fit the mold. We would rather take the road less traveled in a good book, or read a blog post, though video is nice at times for other reasons, and maybe yes–we want to garden.

Obviously, we are not all the same. I hope you can tell I am merely trying to make a point tonight. My point, if not made clear yet is that all the bells and whistles of upgrades and changes for me personally, turned out to not be worth the headache.

Come to find out, God had already given me everything I needed. I was so desperate to go back to “original” I decided for now not to even upgrade to a dot com. Maybe soon. But all this back and forth and changing bios/photos and sites/names has taught me I get too rushed, and I am quick to assume I have to do something.

At the beginning of blogging in 2015 I mentioned I loved to experiment. I was always testing graphics, links, wording and more. Well, this word scientist has finally come to this conclusion in December of 2022. It is that some things are best left alone.

Some things just require you to show up.

Just show up and let God do the rest.

I am only speaking for myself and my convictions. It’s not as if I did nothing in between. There were novels written, places gone, things enjoyed, tears shed…

And had I been called to Sabbtical away from the blog and did it right, I believe I would be on here telling a different story. Instead, during my blog leave, I spent uncalculable amounts of energy chasing the wind.

So remember in life, all that glitters isn’t gold.

Cherish the people God has put in your path, and like me, if He tells you to take a break, obey. But when you come back if He gives the go, don’t try to be someone you are not. Don’t get distracted by things that will only weigh you down.

Don’t lose your joy and mind over trying to keep up with the pace of the world. As a believer in Christ, a follower now, I can’t believe I fell for that trap. Yes, I am still writing books slowly, but chasing monetization and networking opportunities was too much.

Many things that were good and good for me, looking back, were things I never made happen but simply the providence of God. He really does know what we need.

I went back to my original intent tonight and now everything makes sense. Do you hear that? It’s the sound of peace.