fragrantdevotion

I know this is common, but I’ve been feeling quite a bit of pressure about getting a new post up for my blog. At first it was because I couldn’t choose what to write about. Then it was because I was writing furiously but the end result wasn’t expressing the point I had been inspired to make. Add to that another deadline – I’m leaving on a jet plane, and I found myself frustrated that what I had written was just going to have to be good enough, despite the fact that I wasn’t happy with it.

I finally pulled myself away to do something I truly enjoy, working out. I thought that maybe if I took a break when I came back my mind would be fresh with ideas…and it was, but not exactly in the way I’d expected.

What came to me during my brief period of respite was that I needed to remember why I was writing my blog in the first place.  And that reason is to share joyfully from my heart about topics that touch and inspire me, which more often than not have something to do with God.  And since my blog is entirely an act of love, I should stop behaving as if I work for a magazine or newspaper where I have to meet a deadline and just let it be a creative process.  FYI, I don’t really have a creative process, or a creative anything for that matter, so I think my moving this from my “to do” list and having it be on my “solely for my own enjoyment” list might keep me from crushing the tiny bud of imagination that I possess.

So without any further blah, blah, blah, I am setting aside the other wonderful idea that I was working on to allow it to ripen in its own time, and instead I’m going to share how I came up with the names for my blog and my Twitter account.

The desire to gush about God more fully has been on my heart for awhile.  You see, He is amazing and wonderful and He has done for me things that I truly believed could never be done even by Him.  Plus, well, He’s God, and if that’s not enough of a reason to want to gush about Him I don’t know what is.  When I decided it was time to actually start writing I desperately wanted the name of my blog to express how I feel about God, and I was hoping it would somehow relate to one of the scriptures that seem to accompany me on my walk with Him.

So I called on my dear friend Angela who has a way with scripture and words (she’s an amazing writer).  I told her I want my blog name to bring to mind the essence of what I see and feel when I think about my beautiful Savior.  The picture I get is one of falling to my knees is total adoration, of being mesmerized by His face, of waiting with excitement and anticipation to hear His voice and His words.  It is a feeling of complete and total love, of unabashed affection, and of all encompassing, eternally grateful worship.  In those moments I would give my all and my everything to the one who saved me, and that’s what I wanted to express.  And I had to do it in a couple of words and preferably with less than 15 characters (darn you Twitter!).  

The scripture to go with it was easy; summarizing that scripture in a way that expressed my feelings and sounded like me was the challenge.  Angela got me started with some wonderful ideas that unfortunately were too frilly for anyone to recognize them as me.  But the process of us talking, sharing ideas back and forth, of me gushing and expressing and reading and praying was wonderful, and from it came the first word:

fra·grant –adjective

1. having a pleasant scent or aroma; sweet-smelling; sweet-scented.

2. delightful; pleasant

The second word gave us a hard time, but it was definitely worth the wait:

de·vo·tion  –noun

1. profound dedication; consecration.

2. earnest attachment to a cause, person, etc.

Synonyms

2.  zeal, ardor. See love.

As for my Twitter name (@ASimpleToken), well, Fragrant Devotion is 16 characters and it just didn’t seem right to abbreviate it in some way to make it work.  So back to my prayerful quest, but this time the inspiration came almost immediately in the form of a favorite Vineyard worship song that expresses perfectly why I so strongly desire to write about God:

A Simple Token

“All I have to offer is my heart laid bare
All that I can bring You is my life laid down
But it’s just a simple token of my love for You my precious King

 In awe I bow before You giving all I have
Kneeling at Your feet I submit to You
But it’s just a simple token of my love for You my precious King

All to You and so much more
I long to lay before Your throne
All to You and so much more
How could it be enough to fully say ‘I love You’ “

I’ll leave you with those happy thoughts for today.  I’m off to Texas for my niece’s wedding.  I am so looking forward to the time with my sister and her family, and to meeting my new nephew-in-law.  And, thank you God for this time traveling with my father and step-mom.  I pray that whatever these few days hold, that I will step aside and let you have your way.

PS Before my next post I am going to get the formatting issues resolved – for some reason WP won’t let me add code to make things look right.

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I’m sure many of you are like me.  You’ve thought about writing, about joining the world of bloggers, but thinking seems to be about as far as you get.  I’ve had fits and starts but every time  I open my laptop to get going something seems to get in the way – writer’s block, exhaustion, my big fat furry cat Fuzz…

But mostly what has been in the way I think is the idea that I had to give all sorts of background about who I am and why I’m blogging, and the thought of doing that is overwhelming for a newbie, inexperienced writer like me.  Then I realized it’s okay to start with today and to fill in the history as I go along and as it naturally fits in.  So ready or not world, I’m a blogger.

I still have a bunch of setup to do.  My business website is in WordPress but someone with much more serious technie skills than me set that all up.  So please bear with me as I figure out how to get all the features up and running. 

For now I will just say this: I am someone who doesn’t do superficial conversation very well, at least, not beyond a certain point.  All my conversations eventually (and usually quickly) turn to meaning of life sort of stuff, which is what I’m here to talk about.  This natural tendency for “deep” conversation doesn’t make me the life of the party, but it does seem to make me a good friend and the kind of person folks come to depend on. 

For a long time that kind of bothered me.  I’m not the first one picked for the team, not the one everyone clamors to be friends with, not the one people brag that they know, but I’m also not the last one picked for the team and I have lots of good friends – the high caliber kind, so I’m learning to be okay with my somewhat serious approach to life.

I’m going to talk a lot about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit because they are the focus of and measure for my life.  Over time I will tell the story of how I went from someone who loved God but cringed at the mention of the “J” word, to someone who is passionately, hopelessly in love with Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit and Papa God.  It is this story that has been on my heart to share because I know someone out there is desperately needing to hear it.  It’s not really my story though, it’s God’s, and I will always do my best to remind you of that.  I would never want anyone to think I could have done what was done of my own devices or from my own efforts.  As I tell the story that point should be clear: the best I could do brought my life crashing down around me, and that is when I finally recognized that the face of love that I had seen alongside me all my life was that of Jesus.  And (not to sound overly dramatic) that He had come all the way to hell to lead me home.

I’ll close this first post with the scripture that inspired the name of my blog.  I definitely have a Martha style, but my prayer is that this little writing adventure will be an expression of my ardent Mary heart.

Jhn 12:3  Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

Alana

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