Every day is a page in a journal...

You know, I've been thinking about this "blogging" thing.

It is kinda silly if you really think about it. I mean, you type post after post, page after page of your thoughts, and thousands of people [well, ok, maybe more like 60 people in my case] read it. It is like publishing a book without getting paid for it.
If you ask me, we are all ripping ourselves off.

But then I started thinking about that day far off in the future, when I have a daughter (God willing), and she is a lot like me ... passionate, hard headed, outspoken... and I thought about how she will have something to look back on and see my very heart laid out before her. That keeps me motivated. It keeps me inspired to lay it all out here every time I have something to express. Whether it be a feeling of love and thankfulness that makes everyone feel all warm and fuzzy inside, or even if it is just the ugly truth of my struggles and flaws. Either way, it is real. And she will get to take a look into who I was when I was her age.

I've always loved to hear stories about my mother. I find it interesting that she was the basketball star in High School. [Especially considering that I have always been TERRIBLE at basketball. I can't even dribble the ball without getting it stolen!] Or about how her and my dad met and what their nicknames were on the CB radio. I love looking at pictures of her as a child, before my parents got married, and when my brother and I were just babies. There is just something fulfilling about learning who she was and who she became because of it.

Every day of our lives is a page in a journal, whether we realize it or not. A journal, that someday, someone else will read.

There is something about connecting with another human being on a deep emotional level that intrigues me so much. Adam and I sat in a restaurant last Sunday afternoon with a good friend of ours. We stayed there and talked for 3 hours, just about life. About overcoming struggles, about joy and memories, and about sadness in our lives. And even though we all stayed there much longer than expected, cutting into time to run errands and take Sunday afternoon naps, [my personal favorite], we were all so spiritually stimulated and encouraged when we left that place. It was incredibly worth it to spend our afternoon venturing into the heart of others. There is just so much stored up in there waiting to be on display.

So you see, life is a journal even if you never pick up a pen. Even if you never create your own blog. It will be a book filled from cover to cover with experiences that you will have to one day go back and read. Kinda like the Notebook. But the hard part is that you can't cater life to be what you want the story to sound like, or how you want it to end. Because life throws all kinds of curve balls at you. If you would have asked me 5 years ago, where I would be today and what I would be doing, I'm pretty sure that I would not have been anywhere close. And that is the beauty of it. You just have to live...

And the story takes care of itself.

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another, and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it."
-James Matthew Barrie

What will the pages of your life say?

And who will you let read them?