I haven’t posted on this blog for several weeks. Some of you might have noticed. Or maybe not. But I noticed and felt distressed. It’s become a holy habit for me.
I did have an operation
(successful) and a time of recovery, but that’s not why I stopped posting. In
fact, just before the operation I wrote the next blog to post the following
week. But I didn’t post it.
I appreciate my computer. I
appreciate the wonders of the Internet. Except for when none of it works well.
For some reason, I lost the ability to administer my own site. As a result, I
could no longer post. I poked around in the program, trying to solve the
problem on my own and getting more and more frustrated. I asked a
computer-savvy friend to help me and he tried. Then tired and told me he was
baffled and at the end of his expertise. Sorry.
Finally, I resorted to AI
(Artificial Intelligence). I presented my problem and asked if it could help
me. Thus ensued a long back and forth conversation. AI made suggestions that
sounded good and I tried them all, but to no avail. As the conversation went on
over the next few days, I finally figured out the right information to give him
and the right questions to ask.
AI told me what was happening and
that there was nothing I could do; it was a problem with the Blogger
organization and they could have to internally fix it. He put me in touch with
the Blogger Help Community and, as I write this, I’m waiting for someone to
help me. I’m told it takes from one to seven days to get an answer.
You may notice I referred to AI
with the pronoun he. It really does begin to feel personal, like a
conversation between two persons, and the other person (AI) actually cares
about me and my problem. At the end of one of our conversations, he gave
me “one gentle thought, writer to writer.” He told me, “You mentioned
earlier that your writing is personal, reflective, and conversation-based.
Losing access to that archive can feel like losing part of yourself. This
situation is bureaucratic, not existential—and it’s fixable…. You’re not at a
dead end. You’re just at an annoying gate.”
What a nice thing to say. It really did encourage me.
I wrote all the above last week. I’m back online obviously because you’re reading this! And AI got it wrong. I went to a different site that promised help and within two hours I received a simple solution written by an actual real person—a solution so simple I never could have come up with it myself. I won’t bother you with the details because I don’t understand them myself. But I’m relieved. All this has caused me to see how important I hold my call to be a writer. The blog is only a part of this but it’s become an increasingly important part. And now I have it back. Thank you, God.
I thought I’d conclude this post with a short story about my writing vocation. It’s on the first page of my official web site (nancyjthomas.com).
On Writing
I discovered my calling as a
writer when I was seven-years-old. I remember sitting on the rug, tablet and
pencil in hand, playing with words. Then it happened. I wrote a poem. I really
didn’t know what I was doing, of course. It was pure play and imagination. What
I did “know” was that a poem had to rhyme, so after writing that first line,
“This is a poem by Nancy Forsythe,” my immediate task was to find a word that
rhymed with “Forsythe.” The closest I could come was “knife”. The second
line, “about a girl and her dangerous knife,” led into a rhyming story about a
serial killer.
I was not a morbid child nor
did I especially like murder mysteries. The subject didn’t matter much. I was
doing what my father did—writing. And liking it. I immediately showed the poem
to my father, and his delight probably did more than anything else to cement
the call. I knew this was who I wanted to be—a writer. (I appreciate my dad’s
loving response. If it had been my kid writing that poem, I probably would have
made an appointment with a child psychologist, thus killing any instinct to
write.)
Writing has been a life-line
to me. It’s how I process the challenges I face. It’s how I work through
emotions. It’s how I communicate to others. It’s how I pray.
Through a writers’ conference
when I was a young adult, I decided to begin submitting my poems and stories
for publication. I think it was grace that gave me so many acceptance letters
early in my career. (It has never been quite so easy since then.) I needed the
encouragement to keep moving forward. If I had something to say and could say
it well, I wanted to share it with others.
Slowly writing became my
life’s vocation, no matter whatever else I was doing to make a living. The
creative spring from which all else flows is my relationship with Jesus and his
grace. I describe my vocational mission as “to discover and express the grace
of God hidden in the ordinariness of life.”
