T is for Tell ~ by Wendy L. Macdonald

 

Tears trickled down my face as I turned the pages of a picture book. It was a favorite of mine that I read to my children during our homeschooling years. Days earlier, when I discovered our former home in the country was back on the market, this book came to mind.

Like our old home, the country home in the book had plum trees planted out front. But unlike the characters in the book, we didn’t stay at our old place long enough to witness tree trunks thicken to a ripe old age. 

Sometimes a family must uproot before the local weeds choke out all the good cultivated within young hearts.

While our move did ward off one batch of tenacious bindweed, other wild things moved into our new garden and changed the landscape, bringing that mama to her knees again. The heart is a field that must be tended with care. Daily and deliberately. If the Master Gardener isn’t invited to help, all manner of mischief germinates. 

Thankfully, good soil can still produce goodness while weeds compete for light, water, and nutrients. All is not lost. God foresaw the dangers lurking ahead and prepared one mama for predawn weeding via prayers. The harvest will tell which plants won. Because when we tell God our hearts’ burdens, He doesn’t bury our tears under a neglected to-do-pile. He takes on our desires as if He sowed them in the first place. Because He did. 

Writers who tell their personal stories know that’s one powerful way of winning readers. Story trumps an info dump any day. Readers want to see the tears, bent knees, and hands lifted in trusting worship of the God who cares. When we trust the readers enough to be vulnerable with them, they’ll trust our words and read to the end of the story. Telling our stories makes writers and readers feel seen, heard, and less alone.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, (Ephesians 3:20 NIV)

Wendy L. Macdonald is an inspirational blogger and YouTuber who loves to photograph nature on Vancouver Island. Her happy place is making junk journals to sell in her Etsy shop. Her byline is: “My faith is not shallow because I’ve been rescued from the deep.”