{"id":30955,"date":"2023-02-09T17:27:27","date_gmt":"2023-02-10T01:27:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=30955"},"modified":"2023-02-09T17:27:27","modified_gmt":"2023-02-10T01:27:27","slug":"weekly-love-letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/weekly-love-letters\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekly Love Letters"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Stephen King’s book On Writing<\/em>, he pointed out that most people are able to write or tell a story to some degree. [1] He noted that their ability can be improved upon as well with practice. [2] As a teacher, I would say that this is certainly true of my students. Nearly all students can tell a story orally at some degree of proficiency, and need work in the area of putting their ideas on paper. All too often, however, students will give up on writing because it is difficult for them. King says this is a bad idea. “Sometimes you have to continue even when you don’t feel like it.” [3]<\/p>\n

Personally, I really related with the idea that to be a writer you had to read a lot and write a lot. There are no shortcuts in this. [4] Stephen King stresses that we learn best by reading and writing a lot. [5] Our most valuable lessons are those that we teach ourselves. [6] This made me think of the program of study that we are currently in with Dr. Clark and at George Fox in general for our doctorate. We do a lot reading and a lot of writing and apply what we are learning to our lives as we go. I was fascinated by the connection.<\/p>\n

In the War of Art<\/em> by Steven Pressfield, the author wrote about resistance. It is what keeps us from sitting down and doing our best work, which is presumably writing. [7] It’s not the actual writing that is so hard. It’s the sitting down to write due to the force of resistance. [8] Pressfield went on to explain that if our project that we are working on meant nothing to us, there would be no resistance. [9] The more we love something, the more resistance that is felt. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it is indifference – or not caring. [10] The more resistance you experience when you are working on a project, then the more important your project is to you, and the more gratifying it will be when you finish it. [11]<\/p>\n

These books make me think of myself as a writer. I realize that we are all writing blogs and papers all the time right now. Long before these days, while a missionary in Kenya, East Africa, I attempted to put into writing what my life was like for those back home. Email hadn’t really been around a long time at that point. And connections where I was living were hard to come by. Every week I would sit down at the computer and type a long letter to my friends and family about the week’s events. I called them my Weekly Love Letters. The weekly adventures were truly endless over the years, both positive and negative: camping with zebra, hiking the rim of a volcano, sharing the Jesus Film with thousands, dugout canoe adventures, storying the Gospel, so many illnesses, bandits, armed robberies, and so much more. Sitting down to write was always the most difficult part of the love letters. Well, that and getting a good phone connection to send it. My letters began as a weekly update that was just going to my mom and siblings, and grew to include over 500 email addresses when I came home five years later.<\/p>\n

I was always told, and still am so, that I should write a book. Those news letters should be put together and published somehow. The sad truth of the matter is that I never kept a copy of any of them over the years. My mom kept every one of them, but she got Alzheimer’s disease, and they were lost with her. I don’t know of anyone else that kept them. So I learned a valuable lesson as a writer. Keep a copy of your work. No matter what it is.<\/p>\n

Galatians 6:9 admonishes us “Let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

_______________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

[1] King, Stephen. 2020. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft\u202f: Contributions from Joe Hill and Owen King<\/i>. Twentieth-Anniversary edition. New York: Scribner.<\/p>\n

[2] Ibid.<\/p>\n

[3] Ibid.<\/p>\n

[4] Ibid.<\/p>\n

[5] Ibid.<\/p>\n

[6] Ibid.<\/p>\n

[7] Pressfield, Steven. 2002. The War of Art: Break through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles<\/i>. New York, NY, Los Angeles: Black Irish Entertainment LLC.<\/p>\n

[8] Ibid.<\/p>\n

[9] Ibid.<\/p>\n

[10] Ibid.<\/p>\n

[11] Ibid.<\/p>\n

[12] Crossway Bibles, ed. 2007. ESV: Study Bible: English Standard Version<\/i>. ESV text ed. Wheaton, Ill: Crossway Bibles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Stephen King’s book On Writing, he pointed out that most people are able to write or tell a story to some degree. [1] He noted that their ability can be improved upon as well with practice. [2] As a teacher, I would say that this is certainly true of my students. Nearly all students […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":159,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[571],"tags":[918,2198,2197,2327],"class_list":["post-30955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biography-drama-history","tag-kenya","tag-king","tag-pressfield","tag-writing","cohort-dlgp01"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/159"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30955"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30959,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30955\/revisions\/30959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}