So, why do we write?

If ever I find myself full of angst, fussing over nothing, I’ve learned to question when it was the last I wrote. Not for work, but more for therapy. I process life through journals and letters, devotionals and chapters. My first audience is myself, then often the Lord. And along the way I hope to walk with you.

I wonder if in fact this is just another evidence of Imago Deo. Created in His image, we are communicators. We reach out, albeit with frail and fractured chains of words most of the time. We exist by storytelling, believing the narratives carry who we are and our equally frail attempts at connecting w each other.

In the crushing last days of the Warsaw ghettos when the world was on fire in 1948, those who had seen everyone they loved go up in smoke and knew they were next, took scraps of paper and wrote poems, prayers, and fragments of their lives, rolled them into tight scrolls and slipped them into the cracks of the ghetto walls.

A Russian submarine, belly up on the bottom of the ocean, recently discovered the sailors survived longer than they realized and in those hours of pitch darkness, wrote letters to those they loved.

Perhaps a different force, but just as irresistible, compelled the young, Israeli POW named Daniel, in 600 b.c. Babylonian captivity, to write down his stories and his dreams that still amaze us today.

Same as when a journeyman, a tentmaker, with a passion for grace and truth burning inside of him wrote letter after letter to people he knew and loved about how to survive in a first century world controlled by madmen. He signed it, "Love, Paul."

Same as when Moses, a prince-turned-shepherd of five million people on a never-ending journey through a wilderness, wrote down five books that will survive time itself.

We’re like the gospel writers, telling the story. From our own perspective, This is what happened to me. Passing on the perspective of what God is up to.

We capture phrases and notes on the backs of boarding passes and napkins. We send emails to ourselves so as not to forget.

The point is not to assemble blog posts or articles. It’s not about filling journals. The point is what the process does in your spirit when you are forced to reflect, forced to struggle with the right phrase, forced to say, I don’t know what God is doing, but I'm looking for that redemptive narrative that ties it all together.  We write to untangle our heart strings. We write to know we’re not alone.

And the same thing happens in the moment when something we write is opened, whether by unfolding paper like it was a gift, or by a click that transports us into someone’s thoughts. We’re not alone. We communicate. We’re heard. We’re understood. We’re connected. We’re invited in.

That thing God is doing in your spirit right now? Write it down.