Burning Words to Ashes

a love story

I told my future husband I thought I loved him by lending him my journal for the morning. It was my last day of high school. I didn't know I loved him. I just knew he made words sputter up from inside my heart and mind like a secret spring. He overflowed the banks of my reason and drifted into every prayer and poem I scrawled in ink on the pages there.

This was before the days of cell phone cameras. When he came back to pick me up and return the journal, he had a wad of papers folded in his pocket, where he had copied my words down to read and reread. His handwriting was small and hastily-written, like he was trying to record every word he could before the book was due back. I was good at secrets, and he was surprised to know how much I cared.

Three years later, we had a bad breakup and I thought it was over forever. My journals became the place I wrote down every disappointment, every hurt, every record of our love’s decline. The words flowed through me like blood and tears.

For a long moment, time stood still, and then this man who set my river of words in motion came back, singing a new song and asking for another chance at real love. I was afraid I couldn’t forgive, that I would become one of those bitter old women who could never get over things that happened to her ten, twenty, thirty years before. I didn’t want to open my heart to hurt again. When I looked back over my journals, reading the words were like drinking poison.

Love keeps no record of wrongs.

I remembered the scripture, and made the decision to love. I started tearing out pages. Any time a passage would ache my heart, I ripped. I left the journal nearly naked and took a heap of papers to a friend’s house, fired up the grill, and set them on fire.

Twenty years and eight children later, we still have the ashes.

Oh, God, grant us the grace to forgive as we have been forgiven. Teach us to speak words of love and to let the bitter words burn to ash. Make and remake our love. Let it tell the story of your redeeming love.

Dear friends,

Thank you so much for being here, for allowing me to deliver these weekly letters your mailbox. Your time is the most precious thing you have to give, and I am truly honored you would share it with me. I wanted to let you know what I have been up to this week. I suddenly felt the urge to put more words out into the world. I do this from time to time. I get fed up with social media and keep my distance, and then I have this strong sense that I need to just shoot these words out into the world. I think of it as a very quiet resistance to the kingdom of darkness. So I have been making daily read-aloud reels again on instagram. If you are there, come and find me. I try not to care too much if anyone sees them or where they are going. I try to just sort of aim and shoot and go about my day. But I do hope they hit some marks and that somewhere someone will be encouraged by these words.

Here is one of them, with words taken from a previous substack post called The Nurse Is Checking My Blood Pressure and Asks How Many Times I’ve Been Pregnant. This is really what I wish I could say when someone asks me how many children I have.

From the family archive:

A love song from a dozen years ago.

Sometimes I make you mad
Sometimes you make me cry
But we’re together here tonight

I want to love you
I will not let the sun go down
Before I show you my love
I want to know you
I will not let our lives pass by
Before I show you my love

From the podcast:

Have you always wanted to keep a journal but haven’t known where to start? Maybe you have a stack of journals that you started and never finished. Maybe you are a journaler who is currently uninspired. If so I hope you will find this podcast a jumpstart to a transformative journaling practice. Journaling is the process through which I examine, pray through, and come to understand the beauty in my everyday life. It is the intersection of my creative and spiritual life. Every good idea I have ever had started as a scribbled sentence on the pages of my journals. In this episode, I hope you will see that journaling is easier than you ever thought it could be. And that you will be inspired to start today.

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