Archive for the ‘Vocation’ Category

8 Jan

The Madness of Writing

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Brokenness, Vocation. Tagged: , .

Now that I’ve stepped through this door, broken this threshold, and entered The Writing Life, I simply must stay. I must keep writing no matter how maddening it can be.

But it is maddening putting these words out here and wondering if, hoping that they will be what somebody needs.

20140108-114507.jpgThe truth is that I don’t know anyone else quite like me, but my brain is the only one I know to write from.

And so I pull these truths, these stories, these musings out of me and put them out here for…well, for someone…

I am touched by the people who read regularly. There are people I see in-person that tell me they’re reading. And they tell me it is good. And I am so grateful.

But I do get discouraged because those doubting voices try to mess with me and say that something can be good but still not meet a real need.

I don’t want to be a good writer.

Lots of people can write well even with nothing to say.

I want to say something.

But I don’t just want to say something, I want to say something that somebody needs.

And while I get lots of “attaways” from people, I still wonder if I’m meeting a need.

Of course, that itself is a rabbit hole of madness to wonder because how can I even know? How can I possibly measure?

And what if simply reading what is on my heart meets a need all on its own? Maybe, just maybe, the regular readers are having a need met by reading and the reality of them sticking around should clue me in to their satisfaction. Just maybe.

But no, I’m far too mad to let that be enough.

I want more notoriety. Somehow I reason that I will know my writing is needed if I get noticed by more and more and more people.

I’m not sure how or when the desire to be noticed became so strong in me.

Only this…I get jealous when I see a clever post from someone else get shared and reshared around the Interwebs. And I think I write clever things and I wonder why my links aren’t flying through cyberspace.

And it sounds so silly to admit this petty jealousy.

I am petty indeed.

And it is maddening to be so petty.

And I know in my brain that this all takes time and I can’t expect to go from obscurity to notoriety in 10 silly months.

I know, I know, I know…

But the madness is that I hoped I would be the exception. Of course I know I can’t expect overnight success, but I wanted it anyway.

So petty.

This Writing Life messes with me like that. It draws from my deepest, wisest and best while simultaneously exposing my pettiest, silliest, and worst.

So maddening.

But I refuse to let the worst in me be an excuse to squelch my voice. I’m going to keep writing from this brain, this heart and I’m going to keep hoping that somehow, sometime, something of it will be needed.

The only thing more maddening than this Writing Life would be if I quit. Luckily, I’m just crazy enough to stick with it.

3 Jan

Starting a New Year Presently

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Community, Family, Vocation. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

present

Over the past few years I’ve noticed bloggers doing this thing where they pick a word for their year. I don’t totally know how it is supposed to work, and since I was doing well just to start this thing part-way into last year, I didn’t worry about picking a word. I just needed to start.

But this year, I wanted to pick a word. Well, it’s not so much that I wanted to pick a word as that God kept laying this one idea on my heart–over and over. So, I wanted to put a word to it for 2014.

The idea that God has been nudging me toward has come with a number of different words: “showing up,” being “incarnational,” and such like.

Basically, my natural inclination is to retreat. When I’m super stressed out, I probably need a good stretch of solitude to right myself.

I don’t withdraw to avoid conflict. In fact, I’m surprisingly comfortable navigating interpersonal rifts and engaging opposing viewpoints.

But I do like to escape into my inner-world. I have a super-active thought-life that doesn’t slow down–ever. In my previous post titled Why I Love Conferences Even Though I’m an Introvert (click the title to read that post), I explained, “I can be in a crowd of people and be totally withdrawn into my own thought-world.”

I don’t consciously try to shut people out, but this natural inclination to retreat does mean that I have to consciously make myself get out, reach out, and be connected to others.

At first when we moved to this super rural community I was a little troubled by the fact that there wasn’t a paying job for me way out here in the Texas countryside. As time has gone on, what I have found is that this easy country life has been a great opportunity to do the writing that I have wanted to do. And the preaching & speaking opportunities have come just often enough that I can bring in a little income for my family.

All the same, this country life has made it easier than ever in my life to retreat to a fault. And my dear husband is so supportive of my writing and preaching and speaking that he lets me retreat whenever I need to. This is great when I need it, but not great when I am needed elsewhere.

So the big challenge for me is pushing myself to get outside of myself more despite how easy it is to retreat. With that, my word for 2014 is…

Present

I’ve never been very big on New Year’s Resolutions–mostly because making resolutions all-of-a-suddenly, out of nowhere seems like a recipe for failure. But this word, this idea of being present has come from quite some time of reflection and I am indeed resolved to work at it in 2014.

Some specific ways I want to live this out are:

  • Getting up & ready by X time everyday, so I can be ready for unexpected opportunities to be present with others.
  • Putting events on my personal calendar as soon as I learn of them so I can make sure to be present at events that are too easy to forget without planning for them.
  • Writing on the blog 1-2 original posts each week so I can continue to cultivate a consistent online presence.

This is new territory for me in choosing a word and making resolutions. But New Year’s is generally an upswing for me as my birthday falls on the third day of each new year (yes today). So, I am optimistic about my resolve to live into this intentionality of presence. Pluswhich, somehow 2013 was the best year of my life so far, so I want to be fully present for whatever 2014 might bring.

This post is part of the January 2014 Synchroblog: New Beginnings. See what other Synchroblog contributors are saying about their New Beginnings:

31 Dec

So Far: First Calendar Year

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Inspiration, Vocation. Tagged: , , , .

WritingSupplies

Despite the necessity for typing most of my writing on a computer, I prefer to start a writing project “old school,” writing longhand with a notepad and pen. This collection of supplies was from my son for Christmas.

This is the end of my first calendar year of blogging. As 2013 comes to a close I thought it would be fun to take a look back.

My 2013 started with a decision–that I’m doing this writing thing. I knew how to write, but wasn’t too sure about how to be “successful” with it.

I kept looking around at friends and people I admire gaining ground with their writing and I got so jealous. I started taking stock of what they were doing with their writing that I wasn’t with mine. And a couple things emerged as trends:

  1. They were writing–daily.
  2. They had blogs that they kept up with.

I know there’s more to writing than just these two things, but these were the glaringly obvious things that they were doing that I wasn’t.

So along with my decision to do this writing thing, in 2013 I started writing every day and I started this blog.

I’ve been all over the place in post frequency (though never less than weekly). And I’ve tried out various topics and styles of posts.

In a very real sense, I’m making this up as I go along. But the more I go along, somehow the more confidence I gain.

I never want to get too comfortable with my work because I always want to remain open to growth…yet the evil second-guessing that tries to hold me back has diminished significantly. The voices that try to tell me I’m no good and my thoughts don’t matter are more and more drowned out by the ever-increasing number of ideas of what else I need to say.

So, I am doing this writing thing and I can’t get enough of it!

Since no calendar-year-in-review post would be complete without some numbers & lists, I thought I’d share some of that here too.

  • The blog is averaging 577 visitors per month.
  • It’s averaging 1009 page views per month.
  • There have been a total of 10,096 page views on the blog.
  • The most page views on a single day was 416.
  • The most-viewed post has had 597 page views.
  • The blog has been viewed from 66 different countries.
  • Visitors have come from 6 different continents.

The top 10 most-viewed posts have been:

  1. Eat, Sleep Preach: A Deaconess in Depression
  2. Confessions of a Lutheran Charismatic
  3. Stuff You Learn After You Say “I do”
  4. Infertility Interrupted
  5. Why I Love Conferences Even Though I’m an Introvert
  6. The More Different We Are, The More We Need Each Other
  7. When “Christ vs. Culture” Met My Music Collection
  8. I’m Thrilled to Announce My First Podcast at “Life and Liberty”
  9. How I Became a Deaconess
  10. I Used to Go Barefoot

Thanks for coming on this journey with me and for helping make 2013 a great starting year for the blog!

3 Dec

How Being “Relevant” Eludes Me

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Community, Vocation. Tagged: , , , , , , .

photo

This is my view at my bistro table on the porch where I do a lot of my thinking, reading and writing.

One of my biggest challenges as a creative type is that of being “relevant” with my content. I fail at relevance on at least two counts, but I still want to believe what I say matters.

Relevance Fail #1

My first and most obvious failure to be relevant is related to what a theologian reportedly taught his students: to examine life with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. I’m sure that is brilliant, but, as my mother would say, “it’s not my gift.”

Maybe it should be my gift. But it isn’t.

The thing is, it takes me a long time to consume media and truly process it in such a way to be able to say or write something meaningful about it:

  • In my 30+ years of exposure to the Bible, I still have only begun to scratch the surface.
  • I still listen to music that I got in my teens and early twenties–not because I’m afraid to try new music, but because I’m still avidly enjoying the old stuff.
  • There are books that I read 10 and 20 years ago that I am just now mining for deeper insights than ever before–I’m nowhere near finished processing them.

I’m still dwelling on ancient holy writings, vintage music, and books from yesteryear. Shallow treatment of ideas, texts or other media is not in my nature. As an introvert I go deep with each source rather than branching widely into numerous outlets.

I’m not saying I ignore current events. Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that my brain won’t hold pages and pages of the latest news on top of everything else I am still processing.

In my human limitations I have to pick and choose the sources with which I go deep and those that I skim over or ignore. If I ever seem aloof, it is because my brain is deeply engaged in mulling over old information instead of absorbing the latest tidbits.

I fail at relevance because I don’t react to current events in a timely & meaningful way.

Relevance Fail #2

The other way that relevance eludes me is just in general trying to figure out what my readers (or potential readers) want to read and being able to deliver it.

I mean, I have a ton of ideas about what I want to write about. But I just never know what’s going to resonate with people.

I know other bloggers have dealt with this too, the idea that something you think is brilliant gets only a cool reception whereas something you just dash off quickly gets shared all over the place.

This is also a struggle for me because what I’m doing on the blog is, at least in part, a coming of age. Much of what is here is just me blabbing about my issues, my preoccupations, my fear of being irrelevant, etc. I want this space to be for us, but many times I need it to be for me.

So, I fail at relevance again because my content ends up being more self-serving than might be helpful. And when I try to be helpful to others, I’m still uncertain what to write about.

Reason to Hope

It’s possible, despite my relevance-challenges, that what I write and say can still matter:

  • The very depth with which I engage media actually serves me well in providing troves of ideas for what to write about. My constant thinking and processing of old information often leads to creative insights in the here and now.
  • Even though I’m not always quite sure what my readers need, I am listening. I may not be relevant by nature, but I am very relational. By being where people are and engaging with them I get a better sense of what they need.

What has been really cool is that since I started blogging and writing more I’ve been having more interesting conversations. Once I started putting my ideas out there and offering my two cents on just whatever I have gotten into great discussions with folks.

I’m finding new depths of engagement with people–even those I know best in my life. Just by putting myself out here in some way I have become more incarnational, more present to people.

Even if I am still processing old information and tossing around my own personal baggage, I’m here.

I’m showing up and making myself available. And I’m pretty sure that matters.

30 Nov

Sent to Serve

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Community, Vocation. Tagged: , , , , , , .

SenttoServe

I’m guest-posting for Zach Hoag’s Rooted: Revisiting Missional Church series today. My topic is Sent to Serve. I explain in the intro:

As a Deaconess I’m struck by the parallels between missional and diaconal theology. The missional mindset that we are sent on God’s mission to the world closely resembles the diaconal theology that we are sent to serve.

And here is a bit more:

A lot of times in church we think that serving God means that we would have to be a pastor or other paid church staff. We may think we can’t do that, but at least we could sing in the choir or praise team. Or if we’re uncertain about the up front stuff, maybe we could help set up communion or run the sound board for worship.

We often get into the mindset that the truly holy service to God is in the church. But the profound, and often overlooked, message of the sending rite is that we are sent to serve God in our everyday lives. Certainly pastoral duties, musical offerings and behind-the-scenes work at worship are acts of service, but wait, there’s more–much more to our serving.

>>>Click here to read the rest of the post, “Sent to Serve.”<<<

P.S. I know what it’s like to follow someone’s blog and then all of a suddenly they want you to go read their guest post somewhere else. When I was new to blog-reading I remember thinking, “I don’t want to read their site, I want to read yours!” But let me assure you, this post is all me and it is every bit as good as what you can read here. I love the generosity of bloggers like Zach in opening his (much larger than mine) platform to people like me. This is a great writing opportunity for me and a great reading opportunity for you if you click over for my post and the others in the Rooted series.

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