Tuesday Tidbit: Your suffering and ashes—and gold and pearls

Consider including a story in your memoir about suffering through something horrific, only to find a good outcome.

Think back to a time you experienced the weight Richter wrote of, a burden that threatened to undo you—but in the end, it led you to “pearls.”

Job knew about such suffering. He wrote that God “knows where I am going. And when he tests me, I will come out as pure as gold” (Job 23:10 NLT). 

A long time ago, in Streams in the Desert, Mrs. Charles E. Cowman said of that verse, “When the fire is hottest, hold still, for there will be a blessed ‘afterward;’ and with Job we may be able to say, ‘. . . I shall come forth as gold.’”

She also says “It takes eleven tons of pressure on a piano to tune it. God will tune you to harmonize with Heaven’s key-note if you stand the strain.”   

And God said, “I will give them a crown [of beauty] to replace their ashes, and the oil of gladness to replace their sorrow, and clothes of praise to replace their spirit of sadness” (Isaiah 61:3, NCV).

What experiences come to mind when you read these verses?

Someone needs to know your story.

Someone needs to learn how you endured

and found that blessed afterward.

Someone needs to know specifics

about how you came to possess

your gold and pearls, beauty, gladness, and praise.

Write your stories!

There you have it, your Tuesday Tidbit.

Tuesday Tidbit: Writing yourself to the other side of pain, continued

We've received a number of responses to our July 14 blog post, Writing yourself to the other side of pain.

Last Thursday you read Catherine P. Downing's response, and today you'll read Barbara Thomas's response:

As I read your latest blog, I thought, "How did Linda know that I cried many times when I drafted Through the Outhouse Floor?" Writing it was reliving it and the final book told only about ten percent of the pain.  But you are right, writing does lance the festering wounds. And in retrospect, one can begin to perceive that the Lord is working out his plans.

Perhaps you also have shed tears and relived pain in the way Barbara has. I hope you've also experienced healing and insights into God working on your behalf.

Many thanks to both Catherine and Barbara for enriching and encouraging our own memoir writing.

And remember: 

Write your story as a prayer to God 

and He can use the process of writing 

to help you make sense of events 

that knocked the air out of you, 

left you broken, 

confused, 

weary, 

hopeless, 

maybe even paralyzed, 

and to work through your grief.  

Related posts: 
Writing yourself to the other side of pain   
What is the point of writing about the hardships of life?

What is the point of writing about the hardships of life?

“A recent blog on Spiritual Memoirs 101 dealt with the topic of writing through pain. I’m confident every reader snapped to full attention because each one of us could write volumes on pain, heartache and tribulation. Such is the path through a fallen world,” writes Catherine P. Downing, author of her new memoir, Sparks of Redemptive Grace.

Since we received several poignant responses

 from readers about that post, 

I invited Catherine to write a guest post 

for you today.  She continues:

In April I published my first book. It is indeed a spiritual memoir on suffering but, thankfully, it was crafted under the influence of the Holy Spirit and, unbeknownst to me as I wrote it, followed many of the principles Linda mentions in Spiritual Memoirs 101.

I get a sense of how relevant and meaningful my book is to readers by the growing number of people writing reviews. Their words cluster around three basic themes.

First, reviewers make note of the pain through words/phrases like “dark places,” “shattered dreams,” “heartache” and “grieving.”

Secondly, they express appreciation for the honesty: “transparent,” “intimate,” realistic” and “candor.”

The third theme I read in the reviews is one of hope—which is one of two objectives I had in writing the book. My purposes were: 1) to give hope and strengthen the faith of others walking a similar path, as well as 2) to help family and friends around them understand their struggles. 

Reviews like the following give me a glimpse of the hope and help people are finding as they read it: 

• “I was richly, deeply blessed and inspired by this book. But not inspired to smile and pour another cup of coffee. Inspired to love with greater fervor, to pray for eyes that see more clearly, and then to do something with what I see, because there are needs everywhere, there's brokenness everywhere.” –Amazon  
• “I read a lot of devotional books and commentaries on the Scriptures. I can't remember when an author has sorted out an issue or topic for me more powerfully than this one.” –Amazon
• “This little gem of a book has encouraged me to stop looking for the way OUT of difficult situations, and to look, instead, for the treasures waiting to be mined in the darkness.” –Amazon
• “In these few pages, Downing beautifully intertwines information with inspiration, and insight with encouragement, leaving the reader with a gut-wrenching hope and a hunger to know the God she does.” –Advanced Praise

How was the book able to capture the pain through the lens of transparency and hope? I don't have a formula, but here are some things that seemed to help. 

• It was written under a pseudonym. This was done to give a layer of privacy to our family, which in turn gave me courage to be vulnerable.
• Each chapter follows the same pattern: quote, narrative, scripture, prayer. This set a cadence to the reading.
• Each chapter is short, and I limited the number of chapters. This gives the reader space to breathe amid the heaviness. As one reviewer wrote in her advanced praise: “It only takes an hour to read ... but don’t rush it. Savor it. Meditate on it. Pray through it. And then share it with others.”
• Each chapter ends with a carefully penned prayer, which serves as a summary of the chapter. These highlight my recognition of my own limitations and confidence in our always-faithful God. People tell me the prayers are their favorite part. One reviewer mentioned on Amazon, "The prayers written at the end of each chapter are so well crafted that I will be using them to enhance my own prayer life and I will quote from them as I lead devotions on the related passages." 
• I was able to write this book at this stage of my life, and not earlier, because I have learned to be deliberate to tend to my own wounds. Though the painful life circumstances are current and real, I maintain an emotional, spiritual and mental regimen that enables me to reflect on our journey from a posture of health and hope, and not oozing from open sores.

The Spiritual Memoirs 101 blog points out that writing about our pain points can be cathartic. Readers likewise assume that writing the book was helpful to me in the healing process. For me the writing really didn't have that function. Our journey has been long and I've lamented the hardships and sorrows as they've happened; so for me there wasn't a bottled-up ocean of pain looking for a rocky shore where the waves could break. Instead it was more like cooking a Thanksgiving meal that was being prepared for the desperately hungry and offered as a ministry. 

In writing the book, my hope was that it would help others navigate through their own pain and show them how to build a lifeboat to carry them to a harbor of hope. Guiding thoughts were: 

How can I recount the moments 

when God's redemptive grace 

broke through the darkness 

so that in their own despair 

readers can see sparks of light? 

How might God bless and break 

the bread of our story 

to distribute it as nourishment 

to those who have lost sight 

of the Father's presence? 

In the end, I believe 

this is the point of writing 

about the hardships of life:

that while the story is about us, 

it is really about the readers; 

and while the focus is on our pain, 

it is really about the Healer. 

I'll close with this warning from the last chapter of my little book. I think it captures the biggest challenge in writing about our sufferings:

There is a cliff I walk along while trying to stay well away from the edge, and in writing these pages I have been very aware of its nearness. I have tried to stay on the narrow path between detached realism and narcissistic drama, for I know well that self-pity is a dangerous precipice and those who fall in often do not come back up.

As you consider being transparent about your experiences in your spiritual memoirs, may the One who turned water into wine take your pain and transform it into a balm to soothe others."


Catherine P. Downing
www.sparksofredemptivegrace.com
https://www.facebook.com/sparksofredemptivegrace
https://www.amazon.com/Sparks-Redemptive-Grace-Seeking-Illness/dp/057817717X


If you missed the recent blog post Catherine mentions, click on Writing yourself to the other side of pain.

Writing yourself to the other side of pain

A friend of mine recently began writing his stories… but he started by writing about the most traumatic year of his life. Yikes!

I’ve seen people begin their memoir by writing super-painful stuff, only to become overwhelmed all over again with the devastation—and soon they give up writing altogether. Don’t let that happen to you!

Please hear this: Begin your memoir by writing your easy stories—the happy stories, the funny incidents, the fascinating experiences. That way you can ease your way into both writing and the reflecting that memoir is.

My heart wants you to fall in love with

remembering

and pondering

and discovering all the good stuff you didn’t recognize in the past,

and with making sense of what used to mystify you,

and with writing

            and choosing just the right words

                        to fashion your story as a gift for others to read.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to write your chapters/vignettes in the same order they will appear in your finished memoir. Write them in any order that’s easiest for you. Later you can organize them in the best way.

For now, give yourself permission to begin with easy stories. Tackle your hard stories later.

Also keep this in mind: Even if you’re not physically putting your painful story into words (with pen and ink or on a computer screen), you are working on the story. I can’t explain how that works, but behind the scenes your heart and brain are working on how to write your troubling story.  

So let your heartache marinate for a few weeks or months. One day you’ll be vacuuming out the car, or playing catch with your grandson, or folding laundry, and out of the blue your heart and brain will speak to you (or maybe it’ll be God who speaks to you—I’d like to think it’s Him), and will offer insights into your hurtful experience. Listen, and jot down notes to yourself: You’ll be mining treasures. Later, when the time is right, you can use those notes to compose your difficult story’s rough draft. 

Also keep in mind: Your rough draft is for your eyes only. Write it all—the seared, charred, blistered parts, the questions you never had the courage to ask aloud, the doubts you never admitted before, the anger you kept bottled up.

Work out the pain—

work through the pain—

by writing with God beside you. 

Wrestle with God 

and with yourself

as you write.

Go ahead and cry.

Why?

Because God can bring healing

through the process of writing.

And be gentle with yourself, extend grace to yourself: Reliving those emotions and writing those scenes and conversations can be overwhelming. I know of no anguish-free way to get through that writing process, but I can encourage you with this:

Write your story as a prayer to God

and He can use the process of writing

to help you make sense of events that

knocked the air out of you,

left you broken,

confused,

weary,

hopeless—

maybe even paralyzed—

and to work through your grief.

If you’ll give it the needed time and if you’ll peel back enough layers and dig deeply enough, writing your stories can lead to new insights, to answers that too long evaded you, and to resolution—to getting un-stuck so you can move on to healing and forgiveness and peace and hope for the future. Writing your story changes you. 

If you stick with  it, at some point you'll find the most profound, redeeming part of writing your story:

• You'll discover that God was beside you all the while, bringing you people and opportunities and Bible verses and Bible studies and sermons and working out His good plans—many details you probably didn't recognize in the midst of the incident, or saw only dimly. 
• You'll also discern how far you've come, how much you've healed.
• That, in turn, makes you overflow with gratitude toward God,
• and that solidifies your relationship with Him.

Mick Silva says it this way: “I’ve discovered that…protecting and preserving our stories is about discovering God’s story.” I call that your “God-and-you story.”

In that way, writing a memoir can be a journey of personal healing

—even if you originally set out to write it for others.

Let God teach and transform you,

and afterward,

your God-and-you story 

can help others heal.

Those things that threaten to undo us

“Life’s greatest trials often come without a moment’s notice. There is no prep time or convenient moment to book them on our daily calendars,” says Sheila Walsh in her Bible study, The Shelter of God’s Promises.

“They brutishly make their way into our lives and threaten to undo us.”

You know what she means. So do I.

“But,” she continues, “suffering is often the very thing that allows our lives to be resurrected. When we look back, those moments can become milestones and strong pillars … because we survived by [God’s] strength alone.”

Romans 8:28 tells us “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” (NIRV)

Sheila calls that verse “God’s promise to work out all the twists and turns of our lives.”

She writes, “It’s almost impossible to believe that God can use all things, even the terrible and shameful moments from our past (or present!) to work for good for His glory.”

Yes, for humans that can seem impossible, but somehow He does it! “With God, all things are possible” (Mark 10:27).

In order to see how God has done that in our lives, Sheila suggests we make a two-column chart, and “write down hardships you’ve faced on the left side, and across from those write the blessings that came from those experiences.”

This is a perfect exercise for those writing memoirs. Like Sheila pointed out, looking back can yield rich treasures.

Filling out your chart might take a few days or weeks but, as you work on it, look for ways God turned your hardships into milestones.

How did He turn your suffering into strong pillars for your faith?

How God turn your greatest trials into your greatest blessings?

Did God use those hardships and blessings to bring you new opportunities that you wouldn’t have otherwise received?

What did God teach you about Himself in the midst of your hardships and blessings? What did you learn about yourself?

The next time a trauma or heartache entered your life, how did God’s help in the past give you hope for the future?

Write your stories—because you survived by God’s strength alone.

Write your stories—because of the miracle of God’s grace.

Write your stories—not because of who you are, but because of who God is.  

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!