Stories to tell

I am not a consistent blogger and at times I think 'quit'. I 'write' posts in my mind but these often stay in my mind! Sometimes it is because I fear putting my thoughts out there but often just because I don't get around to it.

I enjoy so many, many others who share thoughts and ideas, tell interesting stories and bare their souls. I have cried over adoption stories, laughed about lizards, felt empathy for young Moms and the struggles of holding it together. I read list of thankfulness, personal challenges for fitness and weight. I am encouraged to try new ideas in quilting. Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the expertise of quilters and threaten (in my mind) to quit! And then I take a class from a blogger and am encouraged again. I am following the writings of a young man who is graduating from university and then taking his doctorate as well as being a Dad, blogging about Libya, the frustrations of well meaning NGO's and then a recipe for pecan ice cream. I just finished reading "The Help" a book recommended on a blog. ( By the way, it is one of those books that made me feel like I actually knew these people!)

I think what has encouraged me to keep blogging, even though it may be sporadic, was this quote from a favorite author:

"My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself know to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but spiritually." Frederick Buechner

The challenge to me it to 'tell it right' to be authentic, honest. Sometimes it is difficult to be open and vulnerable. I appreciate those who are......