I am sitting across from my blogger friend and her husband, in Tennessee. The walls are cumin yellow and there is a basket of limes and lemons in the center of the dining room table.
It’s lush here. It’s been raining and the leaves are the kind of green that sing, and her husband is asking me why I started blogging.
And I tell him about Mum.
I tell him about moving home from Korea six years ago to take care of her, while Trent finished up our contract and how I was all alone in Mum’s and Dad’s basement, Mum dying upstairs and I needed community. I needed friends. And I needed to process what I was experiencing.
“It began out of very pure motives,” I say. “Out of the desperate attempt to connect. I had maybe five readers. My dad, my husband’s sister, and a few other friends.”
But it was enough. It was enough to tell me I wasn’t alone, and then it became something more.
People started encouraging my writing, and I switched blog sites and I uploaded photos and it became more professional, and less pure. It became more about defining me and less about expressing me.
“It’s kind of like church, this blogging thing,” I tell him. “You can compare yourself to those around you, or you can celebrate your differences. You can look at someone and covet them and their 100,000 readers, or you can rejoice for them.“
And then, I add, there are times when you just need to take a break.
We live in a world where virtual relationships earn intimacy at an alarming rate. All you have to do is click “friend” on Facebook and suddenly that person, whom you most likely haven’t met, and may not even know, is privy to your life.
Nothing is private anymore. There is no sacredness to life because it’s all a status on Facebook, or a Tweet, or a Pin or an Instagram, and “sometimes you just need to take a break,” I repeat. “Because if you’re not being fed by the living, breathing, physical love that’s around you, in your children and your husband and your co-workers and neighbors and friends; if you’re running to the internet before you’ve done your devotions in the morning; if you’re eating breakfast while scanning Facebook instead of stepping out onto the deck with your coffee and listening to the birds sing, you’ve stopped living.”
I don’t want to stop living.
I want my motives for blogging to be pure.
I want to use my blog to express myself, not to define myself.
So I’m taking a week-long break. There will be no Imperfect Prose this week. And I invite YOU to take a break too. To unplug, and re-charge.
I will still have friends hosting giveaways of Mom in the Mirror and will share about those giveaways; but for now, my own personal words will be audible ones, directed towards my husband and my children. Towards the very physical, very present, all too taken for granted humans that share my home for this short life.
Let’s be different than the rest of the world, friends. Let’s remember the sacredness of the human touch.
And let’s take time to be silent so that when it comes time to blog again, the words we write will be ones we’ve heard whispered by the Spirit of God.
(I will resume blogging next Monday; thanks for grace, friends.)
**Over at Amber Haine’s today, giving away another hard-cover copy of Mom in the Mirror!