I’ll Be Write Back

In the spring of 1995, I took the writing portion of the now defunct TAAS (Texas Assessment of Academic Skills) test.  I was a nerdy 4th grader who loved almost everything about school.  Except writing.  I hated writing.  Couldn’t stand it.  But my teacher told me that I wrote well.  She told me I should work on my writing, because if I did, I could be a very good writer someday.  I didn’t want to hear it.  I only wanted to focus on reading and math.  And besides, I was going to be a pro baseball player or an astronaut someday, so why did I need to write well?

Flash forward 9 years to February 2004.  Here I was, a 19 year old kid at Texas A&M, finding myself struggling through math and science classes as an engineering student.  Not only was I not on the fast track to becoming an astronaut or ballplayer – I was having trouble with what I thought were my strongest subjects, and I was starting to realize I didn’t really want to be an engineer anyway.  Somewhere along the way, my aversion to writing had faded.  I wrote a few papers in high school that I actually enjoyed.  And I got good grades.  And over the course of a few months in college, I realized I actually enjoyed writing.  I decided to give myself a place to write.  Somewhere I could write about both my profound contemplations and my reflections on mundane life.  And so it began.  The Cheese (this blog) was born.  As a quick look back will reveal, my first posts followed the “write down everything that happened today” model that was so prevalent early in the blog craze.  Over time, I suppose I realized that not everyone cared that I snoozed 13 times before waking up, and so my writing improved significantly as I matured (or so I was told).  Blogging has not only given me a chance to share ideas, to express feelings, and to ask questions with other people, but has also provided me a medium to reflect on life.  I can barely express how transformational writing has been for my own life.

From the very start, however, I have been the textbook example of an inconsistent blogger.  I will go months without posting anything.  Then suddenly I will write something every day for 2 weeks.  Then I disappear again.  The last time I posted something here was almost 10 months ago.  It’s been nearly a year since my mind churned and my fingers rapidly tapped across a keyboard or my hands cramped up from holding a pen too tight.  I miss writing.

I have come to realize over the past few years, by reflecting on my own life and listening to encouragement from some friends, that God has given me a gift for writing.  I certainly don’t have a gift for hitting a 95 mph fastball.  I don’t have a gift for organizing.  I don’t have a gift for fashion.  But we all have gifts, and one of mine is writing.  This past week, that really hit me again.  Why waste such a gift?

Words, both written and spoken, help us exchange ideas.  Words help us understand our world and how we interact with it.  Words help us communicate and work together.  Words help build relationships.  Words bring hope, bring peace, bring pain, bring sorrow, bring joy, and bring love.

As I seek to know God in my life, I discover that Jesus is referred to in the Bible as “The Word“.  He is called “the author of our faith”.  God writes his promise of love on our hearts.  It is my hope that I can learn to use my gift for writing to reflect that creative nature.

I am no Shakespeare.  I am no Homer.  I am no Augustine, no Jane Austen, no C.S. Lewis.  It isn’t my dream to become a legendary writer and publish books to influence centuries of thought.  But I have heard from too many people that I have a gift.  I want to use it for whatever purpose I can.  So here I am again, offering my words to the infinite abyss of cyberspace.  May these words find you out there and encourage you to find and use your own gifts.

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