The Importance of Writing

In the year of 2020, I decided to start writing a blog, and wow, what a year 2020 has been.  Obviously, that is something that everyone is talking about, and there were many who just wanted the year of 2020 to end and 2021 to begin.  There is a hope that everything else will start to fall into place with the beginning of this new year.  Therefore this blog was such a great blessing to have around in a year like the one we just experienced.  When everything seemed to be falling apart, I had a new passion of writing to continue to work on and develop. Not only was it something that brought me a lot of joy, but I think the idea of writing, whether it be a blog, journal, letters, or prayer can have great benefits for anyone- even if you have not ever seen yourself as a person who writes or who ever wants to write.  

Words have wonderful power.  They can stream together thoughts that are in our brains, so that way others can understand them.  Another person could digest the thoughts that you were also thinking by just simply hearing them spoken or reading them on paper.  The Bible even talks about the importance of words including Proverbs 16:24, which says “Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body.”  I was also recently reading this book called, “The Fight to Flourish,” by Jennie Lusko that points out that God also really loves words.  “God loves words so much that he filled a book with them.”  Those words are filled with such wisdom that can be life-changing to the person who reads and meditates on them.  Great words do have a great power to impact not only the person who spoke/wrote them but also the ones that are hearing/reading them. Granted, that can be for a positive or a negative, so it is always important that we learn how to use that power in a very positive way. 

Another thing about writing that makes it incredibly important is that writing is a communication skill, and the skill of communication is incredibly important for any job or career that one can have in the future.  I know that even in my job as a teacher, it is incredibly important that I have good writing skills while writing my emails, or writing in my directions for every assignment/activity that students are participating in class.  This way my students, parents, co-workers, etc. have a complete understanding of what is happening in my class.  I have definitely created an assignment where the directions were not clear, and it ended up being such a distraction from the learning environment in the classroom because I had to try to re-explain what I was looking for.  (Granted, there are times I make really clear instructions and the students don’t read them anyway, but that is a conversation for another day. : ))No matter what job, leadership role, or volunteer position a person may have, they will need to communicate to achieve the job.  

There are times that I have to work through my writer’s block.  We all have to work through hardships or struggles in anything we do, and that can even go for me in my writing.  Even now as I was writing this blog post, there were times that I just got stuck, and all I wanted to do was put away my blog for the foreseeable future.  I had to dig deep to think about what I really wanted to say and then write down those items on paper.  However, I have found that even though I absolutely hate trying to write when I have a writer’s block, I also have felt that when I can push through, I can discover even more about the passage I am looking at, or I can make more connections that I would never have made otherwise.  Plus, learning how to work through problems no matter the situation, even in something as simple as writing a blog, teaches us to persevere in any problems in the future.  

Every day I set up a healthy habit of writing, whether this be in my journal or it is more thoughts for the blog posts.  This gives me a chance to digest and reflect on my thoughts that are running around in my head.  This gives me a chance to read a Bible passage and try to understand more and more of it.  This has helped me dive deeper into how I feel about a verse and has helped me make connections between one verse to the other.  There have been some studies that have found that once you write for about ten minutes every day, you can actually feel less burdened by your thoughts.  I have experienced this feeling of becoming unburdened recently when I spent a bit of time writing down how exactly my anxiety made me feel. This was a great time to get my thoughts out and find ways to express my thoughts on paper.  I didn’t even make all the connections in my brain before I started to write, but taking the time to get out any thoughts helped me understand even more about myself and my anxiety. If you ever feel as though you have too many thoughts that are swirling around in your brain, maybe try writing on a piece of paper for about ten minutes, and then you can see what your thoughts were trying to tell you.

My challenge for most of you is to take one day and write for ten minutes. Get out of a piece of paper, set a timer, and just see where your thoughts take you. I know that many of you may not enjoy writing. (In fact, I know that my mother who is most likely going to read this doesn’t like to write.) However, I think that just taking a few minutes this week to write down what you are feeling to give you a chance to analyze, make connections, and help you develop will be very impactful for your future. Some questions that I think could be a good place to start, are the following, “What brings you joy?”  or “What is God teaching you right now?”  I hope that developing a bit of the healthy habit of writing, can make you feel less burdened by your own thoughts and can make you incredibly joyful.