Anniversary celebration here on the Journey

Welcome to an Anniversary celebration week for the blog.

I may be all choked up here.

Every October, I get a notice that the website name and renewal are going to be charged to our credit card. And I get a flood of nostalgia and memories of sitting in the lobby of our church with the tech guru for all the sound and such in October of 2013.

He worked his magic and got me registered with an account called laurareimer.net. Then he helped me sign up for a WordPress site and figured out how to put up a banner and a name and walked me through some of the early stages of figuring out how to post pictures and the Journey began.

I had not a clue and still don’t how to manage the tech side of this thing. But God has blessed me with people who do and they have managed to help me along the way to scale my pixels down so I didn’t run out of memory. They have helped me with email lists and updates and I am so very thankful.

What I do is just sit here almost five days a week and type what’s on my heart in the moment.

And pray.

I pray for the right words. I pray for the face on the other side of the screen that might show up.

I pray for God to use my stories and my thoughts to encourage or make you feel understood, to bring a conviction that might lead you (and me) to be more like Jesus in our every day life.

I pray to make you laugh and yes, to make you cry, because I want your hearts to remain soft and tender.

There are so many places on the internet to stir up strife, worry, anger and fear.

I don’t want that for you.

I want you to feel like we met up today, walking out our journey, and for a little while we shared a moment getting our steps in, or sitting on a bench with a to-go mug of coffee, or helping each other up from where we stumbled a bit and are feeling kind of sore.

So here are some interesting facts from the Journey to start off our week. We shall see what God might pull up in the remaining days til Friday and use to celebrate the gift He has given me to have a place to reach someone I may not know or see today.

My first post was published on October 11, 2013. When I went to look it up, I discovered that due to upgrades in the website, some of my photos have been lost. This is heartbreaking to me as the photos were as much a part of it as the words many times.

When I first started posting, I didn’t tell anyone about it. Russ would bring it up in conversation and I would downplay it. This continued for a long time. I seemed to resist all the support of family and friends. Rachel suggested I get back on Facebook and share there and I panicked thinking I would have no control over who was reading such a private part of my thoughts. Then God reminded me that was the point. The vulnerability is the surrender He asks of me. He has been good to protect me and I am so thankful.

He also reminded me to not despise the ministry He has given me. So I have prayed for ways to share it and when you all pass things along to others, you have no idea how much I appreciate that. But I still struggle with how to respond when friends or readers tell others about it in front of me. It takes me back every time. It is humbling and I thank God to be of some kind of encouragement to people.

On the website I have logged 2,356 posts over the years. That’s a lot of words. And photos. 4,396 to be exact. The one at the top of this post is from the earliest postings on the blog. I used to walk our neighborhood and snap photos with my point and shoot camera. I feel like God speaks through His creation and photos capture so much more than images.

My phone, head, desk and the myriad stack of journals that litter what we fondly call “Emmett’s room and my office” are full of more. Full of photos. Full of words. I struggle with keeping track of it all and things like realizing the oldest posts are now without photos and are in a different tech form which means I may some day lose them is like letting go of a part of your heart. Permanently. Sigh.

To end this little intro to our week, I am going to share one of the first things I wrote to help enhance the format of the website. It’s buried somewhere in the files of laurareimer.net in a section called pages.

You used to be able to access it through a tab on the home page, but the new theme that houses the blog doesn’t have a place for it.

It is the reason for the name of the site and is still and always will be important to me for what I do here:

Why the name Journey Onward?

Several years ago, my sister-in-law gave me a book called Valley of Vision Prayers of the Puritans. It was leather with the name embossed in gold. Near the bottom was a subtitle “Journey Onward”.

I loved the book and the prayers so much that at Christmas I decided to purchase multiple copies for friends. When the books arrived, I was disappointed that their copies lacked the subtitle.

I mentioned this to my sister-in-law, she explained that when she ordered mine, they offered to inscribe my name on it. Rather than put “Laura Reimer”, she felt led to name me – Journey Onward.

Of all the names I would give myself, this would have been the last.

“Quitter”

“Habitually Late”

“Majors in the Minor”

“Likes to take Frequent Breaks”

“Drags her Feet”

“Lingers too Long at Rest Stops”

“Hates Change”

Sure, any of those.

But “Journey Onward”.

It became a challenge to me to live up to my name , and it became the vision for my book that I will someday write….I started seeing my life as a Journey.

Where I have been, where I am right now and where I am going is what I write about. God has been faithful in my past, He is faithful in my present and He is and always will be faithful in my future.

I have asked Him to show me HIMSELF in all the steps I take. He has answered and called me to share my journey with YOU.

Bless you. Bless me. As WE ……. Journey ONWARD <3
February 13, 2014

If you are new to the Journey or have walked with me a long time – even from the beginning….you know who you are … thank you. I hope this week is fun for you and brings you some encouragement or laughs….and yes…tears <3

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