stories. life. yet.

But Mom, it’s so hard to write, said the small girl. My words come out wrong and my tongue gets all lost and I don’t know where I am.

Ah yes, said mom, I have the same problem. I don’t ever know where to begin.

But mom, said the small girl, you can tell stories.

Tell, yes, write, um, now that is a bit harder - mom sighed - I want to write stories that catch your heart, that jerk that tear from your eye that you tried to hold onto with everything in you. I don’t know how to do that.

But you can write silly poems! The small girl huffed.

I can write silly poems and I can see the God-stuff. But I want to write it too. The achingly bare skeletons of us that he clothes with hope and his glory which is just every breath that we breathe. For today. Those are the stories I want to write, about how we find him in the sink when we are washing up or the phone call we make or just the flight of a seagull as it wheels over us in a cloudy storm-grey sky. Somehow that stuff doesn’t make it into a story. It makes it into my blog. Along with purple bottomed frogs and little girls lost. Sometimes I feel like the small boy who is so very talented with his drawing but who cries because he cannot draw the real thing into life.

What am I good at? asks the small girl hopefully.

Science and life and dancing and reading. It takes all of those things to find out that actually it’s about who you are inside, not what you do on the outside, said mom.

I’m not good at sport and I am not good at homework and I am not good at friends. The small girl drooped.

Oh yes you are, my little chicken. You are alive and you give great hugs and you can do whatever you try, if you will just try. You’ve got the gift of people and being interested and curious. Many people don’t have that gift. Just beYOUtiful. People will see that in you.

The small girl picked up her book to escape for a while. Mom does the same thing. Someone else’s writing…

With the realization that yes, I am a storyteller. But the stories are not really mine but his, aching in me. They don’t come out in the shape I look for. They often come out with tears and upside down and even downside up. My daughter is a storyteller too. She just has not found out yet. It’s hard to ache when you don’t know why. Yet. It's almost harder to ache when you do know why. But it would be harder still NOT to ache.