Ouch

Six years ago, the thought of putting down my most troubling and difficult memories really scared me. These words by Frederick Buechner in Now and Then turned my thinking around:

"If God speaks to us at all . . . he speaks to us largely through what has happened to us."

So then I began the painful, illuminating, life-changing process of putting my childhood memories into words. Week One I wrote, "I'm terrified." Week Two I wrote, "My life is happy now and I don't want to dredge up all those shadows, sludge and sadness." But I wrote the stories anyway, slowly over the next few years, memory by memory. It has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. The writing process is not perpetual comfort and ease. It can hurt, and the fruit of this pain is beautiful truth.