I started writing around six years old, I remember being around that age because I wrote my first story. It was about a boy named Jack who got sick at a movie theater from some bad popcorn. It was my first 10 page novel as a 1st grader. I was so excited to show my teacher because it felt like a big accomplishment that could set the course of my life as a writer.
Throughout my childhood I mostly wrote journals, most were about what would happen throughout the week- school, arguments I had with my parents etc. When I was a teenager is when I really started writing, it was the first time I had opened a blog with WordPress. Here’s the thing I absolutely love about writing, pen and paper can’t judge the way you’re feeling. It’s just you and your tools. When I was in high school I started taking a deeper dive into writing. I was not only journaling but I was expressing myself through poems about how I was taking one of the harder moments of my life. We can talk about that another day. What I can tell you about that time was that writing was my therapy. I can’t tell you the countless times I had a million things running through my mind and the moment I put pen to paper everything I was feeling was right in front of me not taking residence in my mind. I also feel that writing helps me process things easier, walking through the words that describe what’s eating at me gives me clarity to improve myself. As I’ve gotten older I’ve used my skill set for various things. During the pandemic I started podcasting that ran for about a few months until the world opened up. It did open the door for other things, I was involved in content writing for other podcasts. I wrote for some time my job’s newsletters. In short, writing is the main theme of my life.
In my podcast “era” I, along with the rest of the world felt that something needed to be done to lift people’s spirits- a revival if you will. Many people were losing family and faith. So I thought, what better way to give people hope than to share my faith with others? For about two months I released a podcast every week going through the book of James in the Bible. I had one more episode left before I finished the book but I ended up getting a job and didn’t have the time to study for the last episode. With blogs and podcasts I’ve written they’ve always been short devotionals. When I was in high school they were poems. But with this blog, I want to have coffee.
In my introductory post I mentioned I wanted anyone who came to my blog to feel as though they were sitting down with a friend for coffee, and I want that to remain true. I don’t know where you are in your life and the last thing I want is to talk at you, as if my voice is the only thing you should be listening to. I don’t want my blogs to be lecture filled. I’ve found myself in positions I don’t want to be, where my head is full of all the Bible verses but my heart is empty of understanding. If I’m being transparent, I realized that my head had started to feel like a balloon—swelling with my own importance. I could almost see myself floating above everyone else, and it hit me how ridiculous and lonely that felt. I had to take a deep breath and let myself come back down to the table. I never want to feel that way again. I had made my old blogs, podcasts and everything else I had done all about me- really wanting the attention of being a good writer, theologian, and teacher, wanting all of that praise and forgetting why I was doing it in the first place. In this little corner of the internet I have set up for us a coffee table where we can sit and talk about whatever we like. I won’t hit you over the head with a Bible and say things you won’t understand because what I say to someone else may not hit you the same way it hits that other person and I want to be respectful of everyone’s journey. Not all my posts will be full of scripture but they will be rooted in what the Bible has to say about certain topics and my honest reflection of what it is we talk about. So, I hope when we meet again we can have coffee together.
Leave a Reply