Share what you discovered in the dark

All of us have experienced heartbreak, grief, and anguish, but too often we avoid writing about them.

How about you? Have you avoided writing the painful stuff?

Which of your stories remain untold?

If you’ll make an effort to write them, you and your readers will receive blessings beyond your imagination. 

Did you miss Thursday’s post on writing about your pain? If so, click on Writing Your Untold Stories.

Tuesday Tidbit: On “careful and honest articulation” in writing your memoir

"Writing about the spiritual life

is like making prints from negatives....

Often it is the dark forest 

that makes us speak about the open field.

Frequently prison makes us think about freedom,

hunger helps us appreciate food,

and war gives us words for peace.

Not seldom are our visions of the future

born out of the sufferings of the present

and our hope for others out of our own despair.

Only few 'happy endings' make us happy,

but often someone's careful and honest articulation

of the ambiguities,

uncertainties,

and painful conditions of life

gives us new hope.

The paradox indeed is that

new life is born out of the pains of the old."

Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out

Singing in the dark

Why have you suffered? Why has God not prevented harsh days? or miserable months? or gloom-filled years? 

In writing your memoir, are you asking such questions? Are you searching for answers to: "Can anything good come from darkness?"

Oswald Chambers writes, "Sometimes God puts us through the experience and discipline of darkness to teach us to hear and obey Him."

Ah, yes, sometimes God does things we humans don't understand at first. Have you ever asked God to help you hear Him? Obey Him? Then perhaps your troubles were leading you to God's answers. Could it be that your sorrows were necessary for you to hear and obey Him?

Chambers says, "God puts us into 'the shadow of His hand' until we learn to hear Him (Isaiah 49:2)."

Chambers has a special message for memoirists like you: "When you are in the dark, listen, and God will give you a very precious message for someone else once you are back in the light."

Read that again! 

"When you are in the dark, 

listen, 

and God will give you 

a very precious message for someone else 

once you are back in the light."

Chambers reminds us that "song birds are taught to sing in the dark," and so are we!

Jesus said, "What I tell you in the darkness, share with others when your daybreak appears. What I whisper into your murky shadows, shout from the rooftops when your sun rises" (Matthew 10:27).

What precious messages has God given you to share with others? 

What vignettes can you include in your memoir about God teaching you to hear Him in the dark, and to obey, and to even sing in the dark?   

Your stories are important. Someone needs to hear them. 

Make time to get started today, even if you jot down only a few words as a reminder to yourself for another day.

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!