Write your memoir “on the cutting edge of what’s going on in God’s heart”

 

“In Raise Up A Standard—A Challenge to Christian Writers,

Michael Phillips asks,

‘Do we want to write

the sensational or the significant?

He challenges Christian writers

‘to be on the cutting edge, not of trends,

not of what’s going on in publishing . . .

but to be on the cutting edge

of what’s going on in God’s heart. . . .

If you believe in your message,

don’t give up on it.

Don’t water it down.

Don’t sensationalize it

just to get published

or to try to make it a best-seller.

Stand firm, in integrity and truthfulness,

for what God has given you to communicate.’”

(Eureka, CA: Sunrise Books, pp. 29-31).”

 (From Marlene Bagnull’s Write His Answer:

A Bible Study for Christian Writers.)

 

I like that: In writing memoir, let’s “be on the cutting edge of what’s going on in God’s heart.”

 

After all, here at SM 101, we consider our writing to be a ministry, not a hobby. (Be sure to click on Do you think of yourself as an ordained writer?)

 

Remember what Deuteronomy 4:9 says: “Always remember what you’ve seen God do and be sure to tell your children and grandchildren.”

 

And in Luke 8:39, Jesus said, “Go, tell your family everything God has done for you.”

 

Accomplishing that, however, can be a daunting task.

 

How can any mere human do what Michael Phillips said:

to know, and then to write, on the cutting edge

of what’s going on in God’s heart?

 

Henri Nouwen tells us how to begin, how to end, and how to accomplish everything in between. He uses the word “solitude.”

 

“. .  We are usually surrounded by so much outer noise that it is hard to truly hear our God. . . . We need to learn to listen to God, who constantly speaks but whom we seldom hear.”

 

We need, he says, “a life in which there is some free inner space where we can listen to our God and follow His guidance. . . .

 

“Solitude begins with a time and a place for God,

and God alone. . . .

We need to set aside a time and space

to give God our undivided attention.

(Matthew 6:6)”

(Henry J.W. Nouwen, Making All Things New and Other Classics) 

(Also click on “Bringing Solitude Into Our Lives,

Excerpts from MAKING ALL THINGS New”.)

 

Always remember: Your story is important. God can use it to shape the lives of your children, grandchildren, great-grands, and anyone else who reads your story, including the “spiritual” children God has given you. Not all of us have children, but we all have “spiritual” children who look up to us and model their lives after ours—more than we realize.

 

You know from experience

how powerful other people’s stories can be.

Many of them inspired you,

opened new worlds,

sent you in different and better directions,

and made you who you are today.

 

Believe this:

Your story can impact your readers

in the same way.

 

While you write the rough draft of your memoir,

ask God to show you what He wants you to communicate.

 

Set aside time for listening to God for His answer.

 

Take Henri Nouwen’s advice:

Make time to spend quality time with God,

in solitude with Him.

Give Him your undivided attention.

 

And then write your stories.

 

A writer’s prayer for you

 

“Many beginning writers believe

the writing process requires great confidence

and unfaltering courage.

 

I’ve learned the writer’s journey requires

the ability to admit we’re not brave

or altogether perfect.

 

As Christian writers, we fare well

if we possess the wisdom to ask God

for the strength and discipline needed

to buckle down

and type the words He gives us.”

 

Xochitl Dixon

Lord, thanks for this new year and the fresh opportunities You offer us to write our memoirs.

 

Remind us that you’ve given each of us life and therefore you’ve given each of us a story to share with others.

 

Help us believe that writing our stories is not a hobby—it’s a ministry! You’ve told us to always remember what we’ve seen You do and to tell our children and grandchildren (Deuteronomy 4:9).

 

And Jesus said, “Go back to your family and tell them all that God has done for you” (Luke 8:39).

 

Your Word urges us to tell everyone about the amazing things You do, for You are great and most worthy of praise (1 Chronicles 16:24-25).

 

Convince us that we should not look down on small beginnings—and that You, O God, delight to see our work begin (Zechariah 4:10). Lord, give us the courage to begin.

 

Ignite a fire in our hearts to work as disciplined, intentional writers, committed to finishing our memoirs.

 

Take away our fears, Lord, and help us compose our stories with confidence, knowing You will use our efforts to point readers to You and Your love and Your goodness.

 

Motivate us to make time to reflect—to think back and ponder and examine—and to search for Your holy fingerprints, footprints, and heartprints. Enlighten us so we connect the dots and notice connections we overlooked in the past.

 

Enable us to see Your big picture, to recognize what You were doing to bring about Your best for us—often not the easiest, but the best.

 

You have entrusted our stories to us. You want us to tell others so they can see how You fought our battles alongside us, You brought healing and hope—not because of who we are, but because of who You are! Not because we are so great, but because You, God, are so great.

 

You have called us to a sacred task so inspire us, dear Lord. Help us find joy in the process of writing, of retelling our “God-and-Me” stories. Place in us a desire to learn to write well, with clarity and grace, and to persevere through rewriting and polishing and editing and publishing and marketing. Bring good people alongside us to accomplish all that.

 

Help us to embrace fulfillment and purpose and satisfaction in doing what You’ve called us to do.

 

Lord, You can do far more than anything we can request or imagine (Ephesians 3:20) so we humbly ask: Please equip us to write the stories You’ve given us. And once they’re in print, use them to accomplish Your good purposes.

 

Help us remember: All of this is not because we’re so great, but because God, You are so great!

 

Not because of who we are, but because of who You are!

 

May our memoirs and lives bring honor to You, 

our glorious God.

 

Back to the Basics: Why should you write your memoir?

 

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post after I attended the first meeting of our church’s fall book club, for which they’d chosen my new memoir, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir.  I was happy but also humbled that they chose it.

                                                                                                                                     

Among other questions, they asked me: Why did you write your memoir?

 

Good question.

 

I took time to answer because a memoir—every memoir—can and should be a gift for its readers. In fact:

 

I believe God Himself

dreamed up the idea of memoirs.

If you think that’s a stretch, read on!

 

That evening, I took the ladies back to the beginning of my passion for memoirs—though originally I didn’t even know the definition of “memoir.”

 

It started some thirty years ago. I’d been reading Streams in the Desert, a devotional from 1925 (!) by Mrs. Charles E. Cowman (though nowadays they call her L. B. Cowman).

 

Not only have publishers updated her powerful devotional by letting the dear lady use her own name instead of her husband’s, they’ve also updated the wording and Bible version.

 

But I’m still using the old-fashioned version, so keep that in mind when you read what L.B. wrote. It’s based on Luke 21:13 which says, “This will give you an opportunity to tell about Me” (ERV).

 

“Life is a steep climb,

and it does the heart good to have somebody ‘call back’

and cheerily beckon us on up the high hill.

We are all climbers together, and we must help one another.”

L.B.Cowman

 

“This mountain climbing is serious business, but glorious,” she wrote. “It takes strength and steady step to find the summits. The outlook widens with the altitude. If anyone among us has found anything worthwhile, we ought to ‘call back.’”

 

And then L.B. Cowman shares her poem:

 

If you have gone a little way ahead of me, call back—

‘Twill cheer my heart and help my feet along the stony track;

And if, perchance, Faith’s light is dim, because the [lamp] oil is low,

Your call will guide my lagging course as wearily I go.

 

Call back, and tell me that He went with you into the storm;

Call back, and say He kept you when the forest’s roots were torn;

That, when the heavens thundered and the earthquake shook the hill,

He bore you up and held you where the very air was still.

 

. . . But if you’ll say He heard you when your prayer was but a cry,

And if you’ll say He saw you through the night’s sin-darkened sky—

If you have gone a little way ahead, oh, friend, call back—

‘Twill cheer my heart and help my feet along the stony track.

 

That poem—

that thought of cupping our hands around our mouths

and cheering on others

who are coming behind us, struggling up life’s steep trails—

that thought zinged me.

It zapped me.

“Yesssss!” I said.

 

I fought tears when I thought of the people

who had already battled up life’s steep mountain trails,

who then turned to me to show by their example

how to choose courage and faith,

those who shared with me their words,

who cheered me on and kept praying.

 

My heart lurches when I think how my life’s battles

might have turned out

if those dear souls had not told me their story—

they and their stories

kept me pounding one foot in front of the other,

hoping, believing, refusing to give up

because if God had helped them, He’d help me, too.

 

When I first read L.B. Cowman’s devotional that day, I told myself: “A Call Back book! That’s what we need—to share our stories and keep each other fighting the good fight.”

 

Reading that poem was a defining moment for me. For years I thought about a Call Back Book. But the idea was raw and rough. It needed to marinate for a few years.

 

Fast forward twenty years or so. I came upon the following words (words which you know well if you’ve been with our SM 101 tribe for a while): “Always remember—and never forget—what you’ve seen God do and be sure to tell your children and grandchildren” (Deuteronomy 4:9).

 

When I read those words, they gave me another zing and zap. That was another pivotal moment for me. “That’s it!” I told myself. “That’s what a Call Back Book would accomplish.” My undeveloped concept began to take a more solid form in my mind and heart and vision.

 

And the fact that God told us to tell our stories

to our kids and grandkids—

Wow again! He commanded us to tell our stories.

 

It’s a calling He’s given all of us.

A ministry, not a hobby.

 

I remember asking myself, “I wonder what a memoir is.” I looked up the definition and—Wow again. Memoir was a perfect format for telling our stories. (Click here for the definition of memoir.)

 

And, as they say, the rest is history:

• I started teaching memoir classes for churches and other interested groups,
• in 2010, I published my first memoir, Grandma’s Letters from Africa,
• I started blogging at Spiritual Memoirs 101 to reach others interested in writing their stories,
• in 2019, I published my second memoir, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: AFoot-Dragger’s Memoir,
• and I’ve continued to teach online and in-person memoir classes. 

Fast forward to that evening at our church’s Book Club meeting when they were reading my memoir. I was in for a delightful surprise. The ladies started discussing the definition of memoir, and then they realized that each of them had a story.

 

They caught the vision of the importance of telling their stories.

 

In the words of Lloyd John Ogilvie, “ “. . . we can be God’s tap on a person’s shoulder. . . . It’s awesome to realize that God can use us as His messengers, healers, and helpers. He’s up to exciting things, and all He needs is a willing, receptive, and obedient spirit” (Silent Strength for My Life).

 

If you’re writing your memoir,

YOU are those Ogilvie writes about—

YOU are the ones with a willing,

receptive, and obedient spirit.

 

How awesome to realize that

God is using YOU as His messengers,

healers, and helpers.

 

Your memoir might take up “residence in someone's soul” and become “their blood and self and purpose”

 

Do you recognize the opportunity you have—as well as the responsibility—to write your stories? Maybe right now you can’t imagine how God can use them to bless your readers—your kids, grandkids, and great-grands, friends, even strangers. But keep reading. . . .

 

Your stories are important. Writing them is more than a hobby—it is a ministry.

 

You and I are just ordinary people living ordinary lives, yet God is acting on our behalf every moment of every day.

 

Take time to observe what He is doing.

 

Notice the ways Bible passages come alive—how they come true, how they are relevant—in your family.

 

Remember our theme verse here at SM 101:

 

“Always remember what you’ve seen God do for you,

and be sure to tell your children and grandchildren!”

(Deuteronomy 4:9)

 

If you’ll put your stories into writing, you’ll be doing what Deuteronomy 4:9 urges all of us to do.

 

You have stories only you can tell.

“Someone needs to tell those tales. . . . For each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.” (Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus)

Read Morgenstern's words again:

“You may tell a tale 

that takes up residence in someone's soul, 

becomes their blood and self and purpose. 

That tale will move them and drive them 

and who knows what they might do 

because of it, because of your words. 

That is your role, your gift.”

 

You are part of a story much bigger than yourself. Your story is part of God’s story and God’s story is part of your story.

 

Invest time and effort into connecting your stories with God’s stories. Don’t keep them to yourself—give them to others to read!

 

“We’ll tell our children what we’ve known

and what our ancestors handed down to us.

We won’t keep these stories to ourselves.

We’ll tell the next generation about God’s marvelous deeds.”

(Psalm 78:3-4)

 

 

When remembering troubles our hearts

 

By now you recognize how important remembering is when writing a memoir.

 

Reflecting—examining the past, discovering deeper significance than you recognized at the time.

 

Remembering and analyzing and piecing together can bring deep healing—and might even change the direction of our lives.

 

Reflecting on what God has done for us and through us can be life-changing.

 

Sometimes, however, our introspection

leads to painful memories, regrets, shame.

 

Our hearts become troubled.

 

You know what a troubled heart feels like.

So do I.

Sometimes it hurts for a long, long time.

 

And yet, Jesus said, “Don't let your hearts be troubled” (John 14:1).

Lloyd Ogilvie offers us this consolation and hope: “We have a place to go with our troubled hearts—the heart of God.”

God’s heart is “a place of reconciliation, forgiveness, and acceptance. . . . We were created to abide in His heart of love. . . . An intimate communion awaits us where we can unburden all our troubles and receive strength.” (Lloyd Ogilvie, Silent Strength for My Life)

 

Take in Henri Nouwen’s words: “We are people with souls, sparks of the divine. To acknowledge the truth about ourselves is to claim the sacredness of our being, without fully understanding it.” Nouwen says we must “trust that our souls are embraced by a loving God.” (Bread for the Journey)

 

Nouwen continues:

 

“Solitude, silence, and prayer . . .

offer solutions

for the complexity of our lives . . .

because they bring us in touch with

our sacred center, where God dwells. . . .

It is the place of adoration, thanksgiving, and praise.”

 

May God bring healing to our painful memories

and our troubled hearts,

and may we rejoice in Him

as we dwell in that lovely place in His heart.

 

Writing about God’s interruptions in your life

Do you like interruptions? I don't.

I make plans. I have a schedule. And long-term goals. Dreams. And I don't want anything or anyone to disrupt me. 

But, of course, interruptions do come into everyone's lives and sometimes they are epic—especially if the interruption comes from God!

In retrospect, we can recognize that God's interruptions were major turning points and opportunities for learning and maturing.

Have you thought about writing in your memoir

about your interruptions?

Recently I wrote that life's interruptions can resemble earthquakes.

Have you ever felt an earthquake?

 

I experienced Seattle’s 1965 earthquake. People felt it across Washington, British Columbia, Idaho, and Oregon. The 6.5 quake (some officials called it a 6.7) lasted 45 seconds, and that’s a long time for an earthquake of that magnitude.

 

And the earth’s eerie roar lasted even longer than that.

 

Sometimes life can feel like an earthquake. Without warning, a jolt rocks your world. What has seemed solid and predictable and dependable suddenly lurches and crumbles. And even when the shaking stops, the jarring trauma rolls on.

 

And the eerie roar lasts longer than that.

Years after the Seattle earthquake, my husband burst through our front door and announced he wanted us to move to South America so he could teach missionaries’ kids.

 

The ground beneath my feet felt like another major earthquake had struck and I literally fell to the floor. (You can read about it in my memoir, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir.)

 

In the following months, the eerie roar rumbled on.

My dreams and plans had taken a hit.

My sense of where my life was headed had fallen apart.

 

What I didn’t know then was that interruption—the earthquake that my husband (and eventually, it turned out, that God, too) sprung on me was meant for good.

 

I would later learn that some of my dreams and plans weren’t the best for me and my family. They needed to crumble down in ruins.

 

But I didn’t comprehend that then. Instead, the stuff of earthquakes—like crumbled bricks and debris—covered me. It was dark down there. I felt bruised and broken. Alone.

 

I was only 27 years young. The old me now wishes I could have told the 27-year-old me that I could live a good life even after earthquakes and loss and the shock of it all.

 

In fact, those three years in South America

were the best of our lives!

I praise and thank God

that He interrupted my plans!

 

As Christine Caine said,

“Sometimes when you’re in a dark place

you think you’ve been buried,

but you’ve actually been planted.”

 

That was true for me. What started as a devastating earthquake ended up being a mountaintop experience.

 

God’s interruption turned into

one of my life’s richest blessings.

 

How about you?

 

Think of the ways God has interrupted your plans. What detours did He place in your path? What curveballs did He throw at you?

And what stories can you include in your memoir about God's interruptions?

• Did you welcome God's interruption, or resist it?
• If you resisted it, what eventually convinced you to do what He was inviting you to do?
• What obstacles and fears and worldliness did you have to overcome in order to carry out His task for you?
• How did God's interruption show you your plans weren't His best for you, and that He was steering you in a different and better direction?
• In what specific ways did God's interruption prove to be a divine appointment, a major turning point in your life?
• How have God's interruptions led you to love Him increasingly with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength (the most important—the foremost, the greatest—commandment, Mark 12:28-30, Matthew 22:36-37)?

Put your stories into writing! Remember:

Be careful never to forget

what you've seen the Lord do for you.

Do not let these things escape from your mind

as long as you live!

And be sure to pass them on

to your children and grandchildren.

(Deuteronomy 4:9, NLT)

We, your people, the sheep of your pasture, will thank You forever and ever, praising Your greatness from generation to generation (Psalm 79:13b, NLT).

On authoring change: Listening and looking at your life candidly, searchingly, and feelingly

 

What kind of difference could you make, or do you want to make, or need to make, with the time you have left on this earth?

 

Here’s another question for you:

 

“ . . . How do you turn your dream of making a positive and meaningful difference in the world into a reality?”

 

Nina Amir asks the question and then she answers it for you: “You author change.

 

“You write and publish a book that inspires positive action or change. . . .”

 

Here’s another question for you:

 

“Can we listen to ourselves in the silence? Can we sit and wait for the whispers of our souls to come creeping, slowly, falteringly, letter by letter through our pens? Can we allow our truest selves to tell their stories through the gateway of broken language . . . ? Catch it before it is gone, capture it in a jumble of letters. . . .” Edith Ó Nualláin

 

Always remember: Your story is part of God’s much larger story.

 

Jesus said, “Go tell your family everything God has done for you” (Luke 8:39). That means writing a memoir is a holy work, a ministry.

 

As a memoirist, you have the privilege of working with sacred stories—stories that are for the most part stories of everyday events and ordinary people. It’s a holy calling to tell the next generations about God’s involvement in their lives and their families’ lives (see Psalm 145:4 and Deuteronomy 4:9).

 

“The writers who get my personal award are the ones who show exceptional promise of looking at their lives in this world as candidly and searchingly and feelingly as they know how,” writes Frederick Buechner, “and then of telling the rest of us what they have found there most worth finding. We need the eyes of writers like that to see through. We need the blood of writers like that in our veins.”  

 

What have you found that’s most worth finding?

 

Write it in your memoir before it’s too late. “Catch it before it is gone.”

 

“The world needs change agents,” says Nina Amir. “It’s your time to make a positive and meaningful impact with your words.”

 

Your words, your stories—your memoir—could do that. It’s your time, Nina says.

 

It’s your time!

 

Our memories of 2020 are going to be "muddled and confused"

 

Musings for the end of 2020, the year of the Coronavirus pandemic:

“‘Our memories of this moment are going to be muddled and confused,’ says Jennifer Talarico, a psychology professor at Lafayette College who studies how people remember their lives, and how public events affect that. ‘We're going to be left with this vague notion that's going to be hard to articulate, hard to describe, hard to capture for those folks who haven't been through it.’” (Ted Anthony) 

 

And yet, your job and mine, as memoirists, is to push through the confusion and murkiness and, instead, to articulate, describe, and capture what has happened this year.

 

We serve as “a hand pointing in the direction of the past.” (C. H. Spurgeon)

 

But here at SM 101, we do more than that. We do more than tell stories from the past.

 

Here we dig deep within those stories to discover what God has done for us—stories about His constant companionship and provision each day.

 

The beauty of memoir is looking back, examining, and discovering significance we might have missed at the time.

 

At the end of 2020, let’s reflect on the past twelve months because:

 

• We and people around the world have been tossed about, spun around, and upended by Covid-19 and its ripple effects. The pandemic this year has been unique for everyone—except for those few people still alive who also lived during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. But for most of us, a pandemic like this happens only once in a lifetime.
• As a nation, we’ve also experienced racial unrest, political turmoil, economic tragedies, and social isolation, to name only a few. (See last week’s post, Covid-19 and those “Beneath life’s crushing load.”)
• On top of that, most of us have experienced personal struggles and heartbreaks.

 

This past year has numbed us and bewildered us, and not enough time has passed for us to accurately assess everything that’s happened. Nevertheless, we need to get some of our thoughts and experiences in writing even now. We can go back and revise later.

 

Jennifer Talarico’s words (above) comfort me. They tell me I’m not the only one struggling to find words and discern what, specifically, was going on in various levels of life—my life, my extended family’s life, my fellow citizens’ lives, and of those around the world.

 

Even in a “normal” year, too often we don’t take time to recognize that, in the words of dear old Samuel, “The Lord has helped us every step of the way” (1 Samuel 7:12, NIRV).

 

Back in the 1800s, C. H. Spurgeon pondered that same verse in The King James Version: “Hitherto hath the Lord helped us.”

 

He wrote:

 

“The word ‘hitherto’ seems like a hand pointing in the direction of the past. Twenty years or seventy, and yet ‘hitherto hath the Lord helped us!’”

 

Or, in today’s language, “Whether we’re twenty years old or seventy, ‘the Lord has helped us every step of the way.’”

 

Spurgeon continues,

 

“Through poverty,

through wealth,

through sickness,

through health;

at home,

abroad,

on the land,

on the sea;

in honor,

in dishonor,

in perplexity,

in joy,

in trial,

in triumph,

in prayer,

in temptation,

—‘hitherto hath the Lord helped!’”

 

If we invest time in looking over Spurgeon’s list in light of our own past twelve months, we’ll see that every day, in each event, even in the worst of times, God has always hovered in our midst, has always loved us, and has sent us encouragement and help in practical ways.

 

This is a busy time of year but for now, jot down a list, make a few notes, and promise yourself—and your family, and God—you’ll write those stories in 2021!

 

Each child, grandchild, great-grandchild—niece, nephew, and “spiritual” child—needs to know your stories. They can serve as a guide to show future generations how to manage their own surprises and emergencies. When your readers see what God did for you, they’ll be more likely to trust Him in their own circumstances.

 

Each story can be a celebration of what God has done.

 

Always remember, and never forget,

what you’ve seen God do for you,

and be sure to tell your children and grandchildren!

(Deuteronomy 4:9)