Writing

It's been right at two months now since I walked out of the station for the last time {as the Mid-Morning producer, anyway}. I'm still on my fourth tank of gas since leaving, which in days of yore, was something that happened about every seven days. Is it weird that I have measured a piece of life in gas tanks?

People ask how I'm liking this new season, and I tell them I can't possibly love it enough. It's a grace, a gift, and absolutely right. {And who knows - it could change again, but for now, it's where I'm called to be.}

I came into this season with two goals: to be a wife and to write. Wifing it is going well, and hopefully Ryan would agree. It's a blessing to spend my days taking care of our home so we don't have to spend our evenings rushing through loads of laundry, washing dishes, and blowing thick layers of dust off the furniture. It's been a relief to go through every corner of the house and clean out the excess we don't need. It's been a joy to make meals and have them ready for our dinner when Ryan comes home. All those tangible things allow me {allow both of us, really} the luxury of having more time to just be when the day ends.

As for writing...well, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do when I had the time to do it. Or perhaps I should say I wasn't sure what God wanted me to do.

Of course the blog takes part of my writing time, and it's so nice to be able to do that during the day as well, while Ryan works, so I don't have to delay our time together in the evening to blog. And I've had the opportunity to write more for the Broken, Beautiful, Bold blog, which has been great accountability. I've even been doing a bit of writing for a project at our church, and I'm grateful for that.

As I prayed about a project for myself, God led me quickly and unmistakably to one that has been germinating in my heart for years, and now is pushing down small roots. It's still very, very raw and I'll tell you more about it later when I have something to tell.

Meanwhile, there was this one other project, one that I actually started back when I still worked full time. I didn't have an intent for it, really, other than to do it. But this past week, the full labor pains kicked in and I birthed thousands of words in one week.

It's the story of us.

A memoir, you could say, of our first year of marriage. Shafferland, Season One with all its comedy, all its drama, and all its lessons.

Much work remains to be done on the many pages that poured from my mind onto screen. Much editing, refining, reliving, rewording. It's not finished, but it is done. The story is down, in its Notebookness.{That was one of the main reasons I wanted to write it: if we got all Notebookey and forgot our story, I wanted to have it preserved.}

I laughed and cried at our own history as I wrote. Beautiful memories, frustrating memories, funny memories...they all evoked such emotion in me that sometimes I had to pause just to gather myself again.

My journals, scrapbooks, and blog posts were all strewn about as I pieced together our story into one place...and as I wrote, I saw something I hadn't remembered. It was in that first year that God began to stir my heart about being a wife and writer. I looked at my heart wrestlings on paper...words of conflict between how much I loved my job and how much I wanted to devote to my marriage. It was a tug-of-war that lasted, according to my journal, two years from the first inkling to the final goodbye.

What a beautiful blessing to sit on the other side of that answer and see the moment of its conception. I hadn't expected it, but I gave thanks in it.

And with the final keystroke of the draft...I cried. I cried because it was my first completion in this season. My first big project - regardless of how far it goes outside our own home - is done. I stand two months into a new life chapter with a completed work in my hand. Perhaps the largest completed work I've written.

I celebrate it. And I wanted to celebrate it with you. For many of the words I'd written here to you about our love, our life, and our lessons found their way into that project. Thank you for being a welcoming place for me to share my thoughts every day. You help me preserve our story in the tiniest of bits every day.

Season One: documented. I look forward to the days of editing, refining, and moving on to write about season two!