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.

5 Jan

Why I Never Threaten, “Wait Until Your Father Gets Home!”

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

NeverThreaten

There’s this archetypal scene in stay-at-home-mother lore in which the child misbehaves and the mom, at her wit’s end, says, “Just wait until your father gets home!” I want to go on record as never having uttered this threat and I don’t plan to start. Let me tell you why.

1. It wouldn’t work

First of all, it hasn’t taken my 9 year old long to figure out that his dad is the softie.

Want to stay up late? Remind dad of something he promised to do with you today but hasn’t done yet.

Want a new toy? Ask dad to take you to the store, “just to work on a wish list.”

More often than not, I’m the stricter parent. “Go to bed” means “now” in my way of thinking. And I see right through that “wish list” ploy.

Don’t get me wrong, my husband doesn’t let our son run amok, but in a side-by-side comparison he is more lenient than I am most of the time.

So, if I were to try that “wait until your father gets home” bit on my son, it would backfire. My son would see it for the empty threat it would be and it simply wouldn’t work.

2. I wouldn’t want to be in the kind of marriage/family where it did work

Not only am I resigned to the fact that this kind of threat wouldn’t work, but I am also glad because I don’t want my kid to fear his father or disrespect me.

I want my husband and son to have a healthy father-son bond. This would be impeded if my husband was someone who instilled fear in my child’s little heart.

When I think what “wait until your father gets home” might imply, I shudder at the thought. The threat seems to imply a heavy-handed father who shames, yells at, or even beats the child to get compliance.

I do not want to be married to a man who promotes hostility and fear in the home. I purposefully chose to marry a man who is tender-hearted and nurturing because that is the tone I want in our home.

Furthermore, abdicating discipline of my own child would undermine me as a parent. Especially since I am the one who is on the scene most of the day, I need to be able to set and maintain appropriate boundaries with my son.

If I could not personally enforce standards of discipline, I would be suggesting to my son that I don’t know how to make rules or that my rules are not important. I would be opening myself to disrespect from my child and ultimately this could lead to greater chaos and misbehavior over time.

I believe that whichever parent is on the scene when misbehavior occurs needs to be able to handle it directly. It is not fair to either my husband or myself for us to put discipline off on the other parent.

3. I don’t want to be the kind of parent who makes threats

Last, but certainly not least, I believe that parental threats are a form of aggression and I seek to avoid them. Whether they are empty threats or ones that have real “teeth” to them, any kind of threat is an aggressive form of communication.

When there are so many other, more affirming ways to communicate with my child about my expectations, I’d rather use those. I want to promote a positive atmosphere to encourage my son to make better choices in life.

I’m not perfect. I have admitted in the past that I yell more than I’d like. And, if I’m honest, subtle threats probably make their way into my communication with my son more than I intend.

Aggressive communication is the wide path that is easy to go down, but it leads to destruction. The narrow path of loving and nurturing forms of discipline is harder to stick to, but it leads to life. (For more on this theme, see Matthew 7:12-14.)

So, in addition to all the reasons not to use dad as a threat, I don’t even want threats to be part of how I discipline my child. I pray for the wisdom and grace to be the kind of parent who doesn’t rely on threats for correction.

At home with my approach

Overall, we have a really positive home life where each person is loved and respected. I was always raised in a home where I was respected as a child and I want to offer the same to my kid. I do expect compliance to certain rules and standards in the home, but I will not threaten my kid with his own father. There are lots of positive ways to maintain order in our home and I’m finding them to work quite well.

For a good, basic primer on the parenting philosophy I use, I recommend Positive Discipline by Jane Nelsen. (Click the title to see this recommendation in my Amazon store at Life & Liberty. Purchases you make there will help support this online magazine where I am a contributor.)

4 Jan

Kings or Pawns?

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

NativityinLights

We’re coming up on the celebration of the Epiphany (January 6) in which we mark the spread of the message of Jesus’ birth to the Gentile “wise men” from the East. But the story of the wise men (traditionally referred to as “kings”) is all wrapped up with that nasty Herod.

The story is in Matthew 2 and there is a very, very dark side to it. Herod uses these “kings” as pawns in his attempt to destroy Jesus. When these wise men refuse to play Herod’s game, he puts the entire village of Bethlehem through the worst horror imaginable by slaying all their boy babies.

I had the occasion to preach on this “slaughter of innocents” story last Sunday. My central question was, whose side is God on when a power-hungry ruler gets out of control? I titled the sermon, Bethlehem and the Least of These and it is online now (click the title to read it).

I have been submitting a number of my recent sermons to my friend & publisher, David Housholder, for inclusion at his online magazine called Life & Liberty. These sermons and my other contributions to Hous’s site are some of my best work of the past year. I do hope you will visit Life & Liberty–my online home away from the blog–to see (and hear) my work over there.

Here’s the link to all of my work at Life & Liberty:

http://www.davidhousholder.com/author/jentinker/

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!

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