Don’t think for a minute that this has nothing to do with you

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Listen to what I have to say today. It’s important. 

It’s not my message, and it’s not Frederick Buechner’s message. I’m pretty sure God sat beside dear old Fred and helped him write. And then Fred shared the important info, and now I’m passing it on to you.

Fred writes about what a preacher must do—not necessarily does but should do—while standing in his or her pulpit. Having read that, don’t think for a minute that this has nothing to do with you.

Erase all thoughts you might have in your head that might sound like: “I’m not a preacher. I don’t stand in a pulpit on Sundays with a message from God.”

Don’t even think such thoughts.

Why?

Because writing your memoir is not a hobby, not a pastime, not a fun thing you do when you have a few leisure minutes to yourself.

Writing your memoir is a ministry, a sacred calling, a holy project.

Eugene Peterson suggested that churches should ordain writers the way they ordain pastors.

Serving God as a writer is, indeed, a heavy, humbling responsibility.

Did you think I’d forgotten about Frederick Buechner? It took me a while to get back to his message but here it is.

Read it slowly—

recognizing yourself as a writer ordained—

as if you were a pastor ordained—

to share a message from God Himself.

Read Fred’s words several times.

Ask yourself what his message means to you 

as a pastor-preacher/memoirist.

Frederick Buechner writes:

“ . . . Let him take heart. He is called not to be an actor, a magician, in the pulpit. He is called to be himself.

“He is called to tell the truth as he has experienced it. He is called to be human . . . . If he does not make real . . . the human experience of what it is to cry into the storm and receive no answer, to be sick at heart and find no healing, then he becomes the only one there who seems not to have had that experience because most surely under their bonnets and shawls and jackets, under their afros and ponytails, all the others there have had it whether they talk of it or not.

“As much as anything else, it is their experience of the absence of God that has brought them there in search of his presence, and if the preacher does not speak of that and to that, then he becomes like the captain of a ship who is the only one aboard who either does not know that the waves are twenty feet high and the decks awash or will not face up to it so that anything else he tries to say by way of hope and comfort and empowering becomes suspect on the basis of that one crucial ignorance or disingenuousness or cowardice or reluctance to speak in love any truths but the ones that people love to hear.” (Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth; emphasis mine)

Frederick Buechner is calling us memoirists to be real, to refuse to merely entertain, to refuse to think of ourselves primarily as actors or magicians.

He’s confronting us, telling us to face up to what needs to be said. He’s urging us to tell it like it is rather than sugarcoating life and faith.

He’s calling out to us, reminding us that we have a sacred task—the responsibility to write about what hurts, about prayers God doesn’t seem to answer, about the terrors in the night.

Writing those truths can be painful. It requires courage and integrity and tenacity. Are you up to the task?

Ponder Fred’s words. Apply them to your memoir.

If you will take to heart Fred’s challenge, your memoir can speak to those who pick it up in search of God’s presence. It can speak to those who long to spot a little light in their darkness, to those who desperately need hope.

Don’t avoid writing the hard stuff, the mysterious stuff.

You can do this.

Pray!

“Hope is the answer” and you’re cleared to go

“During my intense grieving moments,” writes Dana Goodman, “other people’s stories gave me words to describe the ache that was indescribable. They gave me hope that a new day would dawn, and I would not be stuck in the black forever.”

Hope.

“Sharing hope truly is the heart of this writing business,” writes Mick Silva. “Words are like packaging. They’re pretty or flashy or sad or boring. And while everyone appreciates good packaging, ultimately it’s the hope inside them that matters…. We each have to ask…whether we want to share hope or not.”

Read that again. “We each have to ask…whether we want to share hope or not.” That zings, doesn’t it?

The Bible tells us to comfort others

with the comfort we’ve received from God.

(2 Corinthians 1:4)

Your memoir can do that.

That means writing your memoir is not a hobby, it’s a ministry.

Eugene Peterson suggests the church should ordain writers in the way they ordain pastors.

“There are never enough storytellers,” he says. “There are a lot of people who want to write stories but they don’t want to go through the discipline, the agony, the immersion in life it requires…. I think writing is one of the sacred callings. I wish, in fact, that the church would ordain writers the way they ordain pastors….”

Is that a new thought to you?

If so, make time to ask yourself these questions:

How different would your writing be if you viewed yourself as ordained to tell your story?

Can you—will you—consider yourself ordained to tell your story?

Let’s take a minute to ponder: What does it mean to be ordained?

It means to be approved, authorized, appointed, anointed, selected, and chosen.

It means to be commissioned, empowered, assigned, entrusted, and consecrated. And cleared to go.

Last Thursday I asked, “If your scars could talk, what stories would they tell?”

Have you thought about that question in the past few days?

Maybe something or someone maimed you, left you blemished, flawed, maybe even deformed—maybe in little ways, maybe in massive ways. Perhaps they left you broken, immobilized. Some scars are visible, some are hidden inside.

But remember: A scar is evidence of healing.

How did God transform your wounds into scars?

Who and what did God use to bring healing?

As a result of your experience, what hope can you pass on to others?

Are you now super-inspired to write your story? Please say Yes!

Believe God has

approved, authorized, appointed you.

He has anointed, selected, and chosen you.

Believe God has

commissioned, empowered, assigned you.

He has entrusted, and consecrated you

to carry out our key verses:

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

Jesus said, “Go tell your family everything

God has done for you.”

Luke 8:39

Like Kellie McGann said, “Hope is the answer your readers are searching for…. Tell them they’re not alone in their dark night of the soul.”

“…Writing your story is the only way

to truly express what God did.

And you can’t believe just how remarkable he is

until you step back and see it for yourself.”

Mick Silva, Higher Purpose Writers

Your story can change a life.

Someone needs the hope you can offer.

So hear this:

You know what you’ve been commissioned to do,

and you—you—are cleared to go.

Do you think of yourself as an ordained writer?

You’re writing a memoir. Is it a hobby? A pastime? Something you do in your leisure time?

If so, I encourage you to view your writing as a ministry. A sacred project. A high and holy calling.

Eugene Peterson suggests that the church should ordain writers in the way they ordain pastors. 

“There are never enough storytellers,” he says. “There are a lot of people who want to write stories but they don’t want to go through the discipline, the agony, the immersion in life it requires…. I think writing is one of the sacred callings. I wish, in fact, that the church would ordain writers the way they ordain pastors….”

 Is that a new thought to you?

If so, make time to answer this question:

How different would your writing be

if you saw yourself as ordained to tell your story?

Can you—will you—consider yourself

ordained to tell your story?

Will you believe you have a sacred, holy calling

to write your story?

I hope so.

We writers, like pastors, need God’s help to carry out our jobs.

We need His help to improve our skills—through classes, workshops, conferences, critique groups, and books and blogs by pros.

We need His help to be disciplined, committed, persevering writers.

We need His help to finish our manuscripts and publish them.

And to do all that, we need His encouragement, so here are verses to cheer you on:

• Make a careful exploration of who you are and the work you have been given, and then sink yourself into that. (Galatians 6:4, The Message)
• See to it that you complete the work you have received in the Lord. (Colossians 4:17)
• I want to suggest that you finish what you started to do…. Let your enthusiastic idea at the start be equaled by your realistic action now. (2 Corinthians 8:10-11, The Living Bible)

I pray you'll hear God’s voice while he helps you "remember the wonders he has done" (1 Chronicles 16:12), those important things he wants you to tell others. I also pray you’ll find the time necessary to write.

Remember, what you write on any given day does not need to be perfect. Just get it in writing, and edit and polish it later. When your story is the best you can make it, be sure to give it away!

Take in Casey Herringshaw’s words:

“We become obsessed with our words. We become caught up in the euphoric high of stringing 90,000 words together into a manuscript. And we forget the Orator of these words. Whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction, these are not your words. This is not just your passion…. Do you take time to hit your knees before you write? Because this isn’t about you and what you can do. It’s about what God can do through you as His vessel. Do you dedicate your writing time—no matter how small or large that might be—to your Creator? Without Him, there would be no you. No you to write these words and stories only you can write….” (emphasis mine)

Pray! And write!

Go public

Three of My Most Beloveds are suffering a type of “darkness.” Ongoing, severe pain surrounds them.

You and I have struggled in the darkness, too, for various reasons—loneliness, despair, ruin, failure, grieving.…

Yet within that darkness, God has messages for us. Within that darkness He tells you and me many things.

F.B. Meyer believed that in such times, God “tells us His secrets.”

That reminds me of God’s precious words in Isaiah 45:3, “I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord…”(NIV).

God, in His goodness, fulfills divine purposes through our darkness.

Furthermore, Meyer said,

“We are not meant to always linger in the dark.…” And when the right time comes to step out of the darkness, “we are to speak and proclaim what we have learned.”

That’s one of the things we do at Spiritual Memoirs 101! Here we look back and trace the ways God used our heartaches (and our joys, too, of course) to teach us about Himself and His love and His power to help—and then we put those lessons in writing for our memoirs.

Meyer’s words will sound old fashioned to you, but they are full of inspiration:

God calls “His child to the higher altitudes of fellowship, that he may hear God speaking face to face, and bear the message to his fellows at the mountain foot.”

“Were the forty days wasted that Moses spent on the Mount, or the period spent at Horeb by Elijah, or the years spent in Arabia by Saul?

“There is no short cut to the life of faith.… We must have periods of lonely meditation and fellowship with God.… Thus alone can the sense of God’s presence become the fixed possession of the soul, enabling it to say repeatedly, with the Psalmist, ‘Thou art near, O God’ [Psalm 119:151]” (emphasis mine; F.B. Meyer, quoted by Mrs. Charles E. Cowman, Streams in the Desert).

Take a few days or weeks to look back on your dark days—your Moses-like time on the Mount, your Elijah-like time in Horeb, your Saul-like time in Arabia—and discover that your hardships were not wasted years!

Find God’s treasures and His purposes in those difficult phases of your life. Discover the blessings that resulted.

What secrets did He whisper that you couldn’t have heard in eras of ease and seasons of sunshine? How did your life and faith change as a result?

"What God told you in the dark, speak (write) in the daylight; what He whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs” (Matthew 10:27), or, as Eugene Peterson worded it in The Message, “Go public.”

Think back to people who “went public,” people who shared their stories with you during your dark days.

Now it’s your turn to pass on the good deed because your kids, grandkids, great-grands, and your other readers will experience their own dark days. God can use your stories to help them. What important messages, hope, and wisdom can you share with them? Go public. Write your stories!