Why I Write: The In-Between of Jesus and Chocolate

I don't drink.  I write.  It is my own personal form of escape.  My nightcap.  My outlet to quiet the demands of the day, the helps and hugs and holds of little girls and bigger girls and changing girls.  Writing stills my mind and quiets my soul and takes me to a euphoric place that a small glass of fermented grapes or malt or grains never will.  Or even a large glass.  In my world, writing can only be matched by Jesus.  And chocolate.  Jesus and writing and chocolate.  In that order.

And some days the blessed escape of blogging and writing and grammatically vomiting on paper is necessary.  Some days the need for escape is great.  It is not needed because my reality is so lacking.  It is needed because my reality is so full.  My mind is overwhelmed by little voices and crazy needs and endless opinions and extravagant love.  And that is just at home.  Before I walk down the staircase in the morning.  And a thousand times before I climb it to go to bed at night.

A life so full requires a place to lay it all down.  The Cross.  Paper and pen.  A place to thank my Jesus for a life so blessed, so undeserved.  A place to ask Him for his grace.  A place to beg Him for his help.

I write because there is no other way to articulate the love I have for the four lives entrusted to me, the pressure that exists to transform small, innocent girls into strong, fierce, Kingdom-warring women. And such a short couple of decades to do it in.  Days count, minutes count, words count.

That is why I need Jesus so desperately.

But the days of growing them, of raising them, are often so compounded by the frustrations and arguments and desperate need to make it to bedtime, the need for one solitary hour of silence which of course is never silent, but filled with a hundred things of washing and sorting and scrubbing and doing.  And then to close my eyes for not long enough only to wake up and do my blessed crazy all over again.  The life I wouldn't trade for a thousand others, but the life that exhausts me every second of every day.

That is why I write.

I write because the small people that fill my mind and take my breath away from the first moment that the sun rises are the same tiny creatures that make me want to hide away by midday and resign by nighttime.  They are the reason that I begin the day so full and end it so completely and utterly empty.  They are the depiction of God's grace being new every morning.  The grace of mothers is much the same, but not nearly as great.  The ebb and flow, the training and scolding, the loving and fighting.

That is why I need chocolate.

But writing is my in-between.  It is what fills the middle of my need for Jesus, who fills my soul, and my need for chocolate, which fills my craving for escape.  It dulls the senses of stress and strain and struggle.  It documents it.  Stores if for history.  Reminds me of the Jesus who hears me, the One who sustains me, the Love that fills me back up so that I can pour out once again.  When the sun rises.

That is why I write.