I began publishing my writing online when I was 14 years old, a freshman in high school. But, before publishing my first pieces on a clunky 2014 computer through an outdated version of WordPress, I had been journaling in sparkly spiral-bound notebooks for as long as I can remember.
Like a county museum full of local artifacts, the closet of my childhood bedroom still preserves the boxes of untouched diaries full of chicken scratch in blue ballpoint and green glittery gel pens. Before Grammarly could clean up my sentences, white-out and stickers were doing the trick.
Growing up quiet and shy, the words I didn’t have the courage to say, I wrote. So eventually, when the journals quickly piled up, I gradually exchanged them for Microsoft Word and Google Docs. With age, my thoughts and ideas became easier to manage and quicker to share when my fingers could fly on a keyboard instead of cramping around a pencil.
Like most teenagers, junior high brought relentless bullying and teasing, but the remedy and peace I found wasn’t really through retaliation or altering my identity. Instead, for some reason, I found much healing by providing spiritual reassurance for others through the sharing of my words, even if it was hard for me to believe them for myself.
The first piece I published was titled “Why Me?”, which you can still find on my website. I wrote it, struggling to grasp why I was being picked on, despite how good I thought I knew God to be. If something bad was happening to me despite my faithfulness to holier and lovelier things, then what did that say about God? What did that say about me?
While possibly theologically unsound and syntactically confusing, and yet developmentally appropriate, in one paragraph, I hoped my words would help people asking the same question as I was, and feel less alone. I prayed that if the reader’s questions for God were as substantial as mine, they would land on fluffier ethereal cushions than I did. Maybe my writing could soften their blow.
I continued to publish on and off for nine years after the original article, both on my website and social media. My outlet from things like high school choir drama, friendship break-ups and college graduation fears included seeking God and then documenting that expression through words.
I didn’t write to share; I wrote in an attempt to hear and be heard by God. Along the way, I hoped that others might better hear God and feel heard through my vulnerabilities.
Sometimes we don’t notice gifts from God within us because we’ve been operating with and using them for so long. Sometimes life has a way of helping us forget them.
There could be something to the hobbies we were drawn to as children and the healthy outlets we gravitated toward as teenagers. Holy gifts and callings were never supposed to be so complicated.
What’s in the archived boxes from your past? What pictures lie on your walls? What’s scribbled, stapled and written in the notebooks of your youth?
Where did you wish you belonged as a young adult? What did you hope someone would say to you in the hallway of your middle school?
What did you need when you started asking, “Why me?”
Before we learned what life looked like, before we were blinded by cynicism, before we found out all the ways our hearts could be broken, God was still speaking—in stickers, in hopeful dreams, in naive questions.
Maybe God never intended us to operate out of grim anxiety in fear of missing where we might be called to go next. Maybe mid-search, God is simply calling us to remember and return to who we were and what we dreamed of before we grew up.
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Anna Parish, originally from Auburn, Alabama, earned a B.S. in Applied Health Sciences from Troy University and is currently in her second year of the M.Div. program at Campbell University Divinity School. She serves as an intern at Hayes Barton Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she enjoys walking alongside people of all ages as they explore their callings. Anna is passionate about cultivating authentic communities through holistic spiritual development. She is pursuing a vocation in hospital chaplaincy and authorship and is interested in religious social science research and preaching.
