Marks On Paper
the most profound spiritual discipline of my life
Friends,
This is an open-heart kind of post. I have been bringing my life before God this morning, praying the Search me, O God, and know my heart prayer. He is showing me what is there.
I wake up some mornings saying, who am I anyway? Why do I wake with the burning desire to write? Why does it even matter if I do it? Shouldn’t I just be mopping the kitchen floor?
I am a mother of nine children, ages 4 months to 16 years. (If you are curious why we chose this life and/or how we do it, you can read this post or this one…) I am a creative soul who is always looking for God in everything, trying to understand my life, trying to make peace and see the beauty, even in the midst of life’s really hard blows.
My life is good. It is blessed, and when I really consider it, I wouldn’t trade this life for any other version I could imagine. But it is not easy, and all griefs and heartaches and struggles must be experienced with a watching audience of children of all ages. It is messy and noisy living with this many people, it is difficult to navigate emotions and big feelings, to try and mother so many different types of people with different needs and desires and sensitivities. To explain life when you are trying to understand it yourself. Time to think must almost always be bargained for and scheduled, and it wearisome to think for so many people all day long every single day. I confess that sometimes my soul needs to hide behind a locked door.
Today I had breakfast alone in my little office, I pulled out a journal and began to pour my heart out to God. Sometimes, I feel locked out of my own life. There are so many needs that break against me, morning to night and even through the night, that I often feel restless and/or desperate and forget who I am and why I am doing all of this. I miss the carefree mind I once had. I miss “free” time. I miss certain rhythms of life that are not possible in this season.
I can feel a knot tightening in my chest and words banging around behind the bars of my brain.
I’m sure there are other ways to find peace in life, but for me, it always comes back to marks on paper. I start to move my hand across the blank page, and I can sense that God is loosening the knot. He is opening my hands, he is opening my heart. I begin to write my anxieties down, see them on paper, and remember that I am not in control and I never have been. I leave them there with God. I write the details of the morning—the baby’s sweet smile, the stops and starts of a song being worked out on the piano, the warmth and fragrance of coffee, birds in flight. Those marks draw an open door back into the beauty of my real, sacred, everyday life.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t care so much about life having to make sense to me. That I didn’t have to sift every experience of my life through words to come to peace with it. But that is who I am, deep down, at the very core. I write the details of my life to find the meaning in them. I draw the contours of my life to see the shape of God’s grace in every bit of it. At the end of the day, the most defining creative work and spiritual discipline of my life is simply making marks on paper. I laugh in words. I grieve in words. I love and long in words. In words, my soul sings.
Sending love this morning, and a little hint at some news. I am in the process of turning my journaling course into a book, which has been a prayer and dream of mine for several years. I have decided to publish the first draft here on Substack, one chapter a month over the next 8 or 9 months. My hope is that some of you would like to go through the book as it is created in real-time and journal alongside me. I am also planning on hosting some live online read-aloud journaling sessions where we can journal and share in a group. I will be making these chapters and read-aloud sessions available exclusively to my paid supporters, as this will be time-consuming and require quiet a lot of effort and, if I’m honest, courage on my part. I had two very hopeful phone interviews with a big-name publishing company three years ago, and my journaling book was carried remarkably far downstream but was eventually dropped because I did not have 50,000 or more followers on social media. At that time, I had to make a choice whether I was going to spend my life trying to gain followers, or if I was going to write. I decided to write. Since then, I wrote, designed, and self-published my first book, and I have written weekly posts on Substack for the last two and a half years. I want to write the text for this book about journaling now so that when it comes time to publish the beautiful, artfully put-together book that I see in my head, I will be ready. I often pray that God will establish the work of my hands for me, and I see this as the next major creative work that He is establishing for me. The content is already there—I will just be writing it in book form, refining the language and ideas, and reworking it to include things that I have learned and experienced since I created the course in 2020. I see this book as a hand-in-hand journaling experience, and I want to share how the process of journaling can help us through our lives. I really do not know where I would be without the ability to make these marks on paper. If you have been following my writing for some time, and this interests you, would you consider becoming a paid supporter? I would love to show you this book as I write it and to have your company here. Or if you are new to my writing, but this post speaks to you and you would like to learn more about my process for journaling, would you join me? (Paid subscribers also get instant access to my 6-week video journaling course.) And to all of my current and past paid supporters—thank you. You will never know the courage you give me to do things that are braver than I feel. Here goes…
More news and dates coming soon, but I hope to drop the first chapter sometime in August.
Sending love,
Mackenzie
