From the start it has been a learning curve….<3
First off, thank you to each and every person for the show of love and support yesterday. YOU made ME cry. In a good and grateful and special way. Thank you from the absolute deepest parts of my heart.
There is a story behind the one where I sat with my old portable laptop in the church lobby and started this thing on the internet with the help of Fred.
It started with Russ suggesting I send a newsletter to our Sunday School class every week with some words of encouragement. I would send it out every Friday and the list grew to well over a hundred people as our class would share and pass along and others would ask to be included on the email.
From there, Russ said I should write.
I told him I was writing. He said no – write in a way that more people can see it.
There are those darn tears again.
He urged me to find a writer’s conference. So, as fools rush in where angels fear to tread, I signed up to attend Lysa TerKeurst’s She Speaks conference being held in late July of 2013. Russ made all the arrangements for me to get to Charlotte, N.C. including a shuttle to pick me up at the airport and get me to the conference hotel.
I was a nervous wreck researching what to wear, what to take and of all things, with a newsletter that went out to a group of Sunday School class members and their family and friends, I made an appointment with a publisher because Russ was encouraging me to write a book about our experiences caring for three elderly family members from 2003-2010 as we raised our family of teens and young adults.
Somewhere in these boxes of journals is the one I kept from that trip. There is a special story behind the whole thing that I don’t have time to do justice to for today, so please come back tomorrow.
But for today, I want to share that I did meet with that publisher. Her name is Blythe Daniel and you may have come across her name if you read Christian books. She is a literary agent and marketer who has worked with major Christian authors and publishing houses.
She’s kind of a big deal.
I realized before I even sat down with her that I was probably not ready for this since I had never even attended a conference. But it was too late. She was more than kind as I pulled out a few typed pages of ideas. Our appointments were on a tight schedule so she didn’t even take the few papers I had pulled together. She asked me about my “reach.”
My what?
How many followers did I have?
I can still feel the red rising in my cheeks as I explained that I simply wrote a weekly newsletter and while I was shocked at the number of people it had expanded to on the address list, I realized that I certainly was swimming in breaker waters with a a child’s set of inflated plastic swimmies around my biceps.
As I gathered my things and fought back tears of embarrassment at how little I knew, she smiled so sweetly and she said words I treasure to this day.
“One hundred people is a nice sized church in many places. Keep doing what you are doing.”
This wasn’t the only time God encouraged my heart even though I was clueless about what He might be wanting me to do. At one point I went into the prayer room they had prepared for us and there on a table were all of our names written out with a Scripture beside it that had been prayed over us.
I don’t remember the reference, but I remember realizing that I was not there by accident.
As I attended various sessions, I learned about this world of “blogs” and I took notes and dared to dream and as you can see, God has continued to bless me with the means and words to share His kindness extended daily to each of us.
His grace and His mercy never run out. He truly uses the foolish things of this world to confound the wise and the fact that anyone takes time to read what I write and get something out of it is proof positive of His redemptive work for one like me.
So come back tomorrow and hear a story I haven’t ever shared on the blog about that first conference and God’s timing and lessons that never grow old.
Blessings friends <3