Final Draft

Hullo.

It’s me again.

I find though, that you don’t really know who that is.  It’s been so long since I started this trifle of a blog that even if you knew me then, you’d still wouldn’t know me now.  I considered for a moment starting a new space — finding a clean slate and beginning again.  But these 550 pathetically “written and illustrated” are as much a part of who I am as my current pool of thoughts.  They made me the writer (and seamstress, if we must go there) that I am today and though they are embarrassing they are still a part of me.

Yes, that one you don’t really know.

The me that writes and journals and prays her life back into order, but rarely ever shares because she is wary of the darkness.  That darkness you see when you get on stage.  You’re nervous to perform and a little scarred because you cannot see anything but the harsh light on your retina.  But you know there are people out there.  Real people.  Unknown people.

So instead of walking on stage you stand in the wings; a speech on your lips, music in your fingers, drafts in your mind.   

As a friend so aptly put it, we have "lives composed of drafts."  Words and feelings and thoughts that are always written and never shared.  Written on our hearts, written on our hands, written in one thousand and one little notebooks. . .written on the web.  Only God knows if even this will ever be published.  It is so much easier to keep things inside sometimes.  To stay in that blessed place you may call a mind but we introverts call a home.  But what then is the point?

As beautiful as it is, this simple solitary state, there is a beauty far deeper.  There is a calling far greater.  There is a God so much bigger, and he created me to relate.  That breath he breathed into me wasn’t meant to fill a balloon.  It was a wind that is supposed to keep on moving.  To spread the good news like wild fire, to fill the sails of a child’s imagination, to  lift up the wings of the brokenhearted, to carry worship straight up to His throne.  I think I was created to be a river, not a reservoir (There I go mixing up my metaphors again).  My Dad says we’re faucets, not sponges, but that not nearly as poetic as a river.  

So if all of this is true, and sharing really is caring, then why am I living a life of drafts? Why am I afraid to let God use me?  Yes, I am incomplete.  Yes, I am a work in progress.  But if my pride will be hurt by not being perfect, is that such a price to pay for another’s blessing?  God uses broken things.  He heals the wounded, and he makes the unclean thing clean.  

So this is me.  And my final draft.

"And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”
Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar.  And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.”"

Isaiah 6:4-8