I’m flying home from Arkansas, completely filled up to the brim with all kinds of wonderful from a fabulous weekend in Rogers for AWBU! What a great conference with a wonderful group of folks!
As usual, I learned a ton and got to connect lots of names with faces.
I also had the opportunity to share a little bit from my own blogging journey.
These days, my favorite thing about blogging is the storytelling, so at the conference I shared three ways I think we can find those great stories for our blog.
First we talked about what compels you to subscribe to someone’s site?
I’ll tell you what it is for me.
They make me laugh.
They inspire me.
Or they take me outside of myself, my day, my world for a magical moment.
And the blogs I keep reading over and over for years and years do all three.
They tell great stories.
But in order to tell a great story, you need to live one.
Three Kinds of Stories To Live and To Tell
The Sacred Everyday
Noteworthy Days
The Grand Adventures
The Sacred Everyday is an easy story to get started in telling because it is the one you are already living. Maybe you think you can’t tell a good story because your real life is boring. And it is. Sort of. Every day we wake up. We do dishes. We do laundry. We take care of kids and pets and lunches and work. We get takeout. We go to bed. Then we wake up and do it again.
Recently I saw this movie, called About Time about a man who could time travel. His father could also time travel and at some point he told his son that his secret to having a happy life was to go back and live each day again. Only the second time around, since he already knew how the day was going to go, he could pay closer attention. Appreciate all the little details of life, people’s expressions. Celebrate the mundane.
So the man started to do that and he found that he appreciated life more. And pretty soon, he stopped needing to go back and live the day again, because he started living the day that way from the start. From the moment he got up, he was awake to life. To people. To miracles.
Donald Miller says this about life in his book about story, A Million Miles in A Thousand Years:
The experience is so slow you could easily come to believe life isn’t that big of a deal, that life isn’t staggering. What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it. We are like spoiled children, no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given. It’s just another sunset. Just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.
He says that maybe we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life because we don’t want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgement. If we think life isn’t remarkable, the we can be “unwilling victims rather than grateful participants.”
The small details of life are miraculous if we are paying attention, if we are willing to be struck by the fact that life is staggering.
I’m going to stop there and share the other two ways we can live + tell great stories on another day.
For now, I would love for you to do one of the following:
a) Share a small miracle in the comments, preferably one you noticed in the last 24 hours. A Sacred Everyday moment that could be a story or blog post.
b) Share a link to a blog post where you are focusing on telling a Sacred Everyday kind of story.
c) Write a Sacred Everyday kind of story on your blog and link back to this post or tweet it at me so I can read it.
Bonus: A few blogs I love who do this Sacred Everyday story well:
Kyran Pittman at Planting Dandelions
Ann Voskamp at A Holy Experience
PS
I LOVED getting to visit with so many of you at AWBU! I’m already looking forward to next year.
XO
Thanks so much Alison for such a lovely session and sharing this here.
My sacred everyday moment… Last night Nathan & I went for a walk in our local park. The moon hung large in the sky round and pale yellow. Lavender clouds floated by obscuring parts of it and making the sky look like a painting. As the sun set the moon grew brighter and brighter and cast a pale moon glow over the park. We came home and realized it was the last “super moon” of the season. Totally stumbled upon by happenstance. It was stunning.
This post celebrates a sacred everyday recipe… Mamaw’s Chicken Dumplins http://www.sarahshotts.com/blog/heirloom-family-recipe-films/ I believe it’s so important to take time to connect with the generations before us and take time out of our days to connect over these simple pleasures.
Sunsets might just be my favorite #SacredEveryday moments. I think I should make a weekly date with a local sunset viewpoint. Especially since as the days get shorter here in Scotland.
I love the idea of recording heirloom recipes this way. I did this with my Grandmother and her chocolate cake just a few months before we lost her and I’m so thankful for the memory. I wish we had filmed it though! What a treasure. (http://www.alisonchino.com/2012/09/07/grandmothers-chocolate-cake/)
My husband made it home safely from Sheridan today where he was traveling for work – with a completely dead battery and a terminal post that had been eaten away by battery acid. I’m so thankful that he got here with those kind of problems – and that they’re now fixed! Family is everything!
Love it Jennifer. Sometimes I think we are not nearly amazed enough at all the times we get from Point A to Point B without incident. I’m super thankful to have cars that run. 🙂
Last night, unexpectedly, I got to take care of 2 babies. One was 3 months, and one was a year. I rocked both of them to sleep, separately. They both laid their heads on my shoulder and fell fast – and in my stage of teenagers who like to tell me everything I am doing wrong, it was so sweet to know I can still do a few things right. I rocked them quietly as the sun went down and was grateful for the stillness.
Is there anything better than a sleeping baby on your chest? I love those moments.
Oh, me too, Angie. Me too.
YES to this. I need some babies in my life. So sweet.
Today I sat, at different points of the days and just listened. Really listened to the thoughts and stories that my children had to say. I don’t do that enough. Either I’m too tired or we’re all too busy. But is was wonderful to slow my pace and let them ramble.