Beginnings: why I would start a blog

I must have been twelve or thirteen years old when I read The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank. It left me with a passion for life and for writing about it, and I promptly started my own journal. Anne had modeled sharing your deepest feelings and emotions, not just telling about your day. I remember describing a fight with my parents and splattering drops of water over the pages because tears seemed appropriate. Some pages in that loose leaf notebook have pasted pictures of “Man from U.N.C.L.E.”’s Illya Kuryakin cut out of the newspaper entertainment section. It’s odd to see my teenage heartthrob in the role of a crotchety old man cutting up dead bodies on NCIS. He must be much older than I am.

Chinese friends gave me a beautifully covered blank book as a high school graduation present. I used it as a journal at the month long School of Leadership Training camp at Cedar Campus in Cedarville, Michigan, where I met Steve. Of course, I didn’t know I was going to meet my life partner. At the beginning of the journal I was making it a point to sit on one of the front rows in teaching sessions to be sure I wasn’t distracted by the back of a certain someone’s head in front of me. I guess that’s the thing with a journal—you never know where it is going to take you or what will turn out to have a significance you hadn’t anticipated.

When I started dating Steve, my journaling stopped. We were living in different states and writing weekly letters in which I poured out my deepest feelings and emotions. Who needs a journal when you have a winsome Christian guy ready to listen? Marriage, children, the mission field. I was writing regular letters to my parents and prayer letters about our ministry. I didn’t have time for journaling.

Then I began writing fiction. Making up stories was much more exciting that the humdrum of daily living even if it was in such places as Ethiopia, Brazil or Mozambique. “You should write a book about your life,” people sometimes told me. But what would I say? We were never kidnapped by rebels. No one ever chased me on a snowmobile. We hadn’t lost a child or suffered terrible hardship.

“Every writer should have a blog,” someone told me recently at the Cape Town International Book Fair. “It’s how you maintain contact with your readers. You write about little things that strike you during the day.” That sounded like a waste of time to me. Why would anyone want to read about little things that strike me during the day? Besides, I’m too busy trying to finish this novel.

But yesterday after I read the manuscript of my story “The Magic Place” to the children at Arebaokeng Center in Tembisa, two teens hung around to talk. “I love reading and writing stories,” J said. “If I wrote a story would you type it for me?”

I laughed. “If I can read your writing, I will type it for you.”

J was orphaned when she was eleven. She was lucky; she has older brothers. Her friend W has been the head of her household, responsible for her younger brother, since she was thirteen. Both girls are now tenth graders. They go to a Zionist church and think that stuff about God is “really beautiful.”

It occurred to me that there are people who are not interested in “little things that strike me during the day,” but would be vitally interested in the children to whom I read stories at Saint Francis Care Center or in the South African township of Tembisa. Maybe someone would even commit to pray for these children.

A blog is not a journal. For one thing it is much too public, but I will try to write once a week. I will not keep you informed on my whole life or up-to-date on ministry prayer request. (If you would like to get our electronic prayer letter, please let me know.) I will talk about the children, books in Africa or my own writing, and perhaps from time to time, our travels. If you are interested, come back and read.