Monday, July 18, 2011

How To Tell A Story (Without Bullet Points)

The day comes like an army, heat their spears and arrows and I sit in the bathroom, honey-sticky sweat on my skin, googling "telling a story" with my toothbrush absently in my mouth. A few weeks ago, I scribbled a goal.

Learn how to slow down and tell a story.

I guess in this hurried business of life, I just forgot. Since this heat lends itself well to sitting, here I sit. I wanted to write a post with bullet points, because they are fabulous, but in my brain, I have only loosely aligned bullet points and they wouldn't do much more than punctuate the page. Instead, I will tell you a story.

Once upon a time, there was my mother. She was not my mother at the time because she was young. In the midst of her youngness, she wanted a fabulous career, to become a writer and to say great and wonderful things to the people at large.

Instead she met a man who wanted to change her mind and marry her and thereby change her direction. With some amount of hesitation (an agreement and a broken engagement), she stopped, listened for God's voice and then followed this man. Over the course of twelve years, this man and woman had become father and mother to eight small children.

My mother found that she was called to have a quiet but equally as important career as a mother, that she would write, but not words in a best seller. She was called to write with invisible ink of the souls of her children, to live truth and love, to speak of great and wonderful things to the people closest to her. (She blogs here.)


Wow, God, I like the way you work.

R<3

Listening to Fair - Monday

2 comments:

  1. smiles. sounds like you got all the help you need in writing that story...so i will pop over and check her out...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Awesome story. =) Reminds me of you.

    ReplyDelete