I’ve amassed a lot of notebooks and loose pages over the years. Every so often I would have a purge and ditch a whole bunch (often by burning them to destroy any chance of future embarrassment) but mostly I keep them ‘safe’ on a shelf or in a drawer.

Recently I’ve been challenged to take the thoughts I kept in my notebooks on my shelf and share them more widely. I nervously started taking some baby steps. (Actually not baby steps because babies tend to step courageously until they fall over.) So I started taking those small steps that older kids make when they are playing that game where they are blindfolded and have to follow instructions to move forward given by an un-blindfolded friend, you know… like tiny step, shuffle, pause, tiny step, shriek, shuffle…

My friends tried to encourage me, and I would momentarily be encouraged. Then fear and doubt would creep back in. After all, friends have to be encouraging, don’t they? It’s like in their actual job description.

I’ve listened to inspiring teaching about purpose and heard motivational podcasts and read books about how we are our own barriers to success, and yet the writing stayed in the notebooks, and, when full,  the notebooks would go on the shelf.

Then, I was listening to a sermon podcast (‘Let the dirt do its work’) from Elevation Church and 12 minutes in Steven Furtick said,

“We’ve gotten to be professional seed collectors who know how to highlight our Bibles and fill notebooks with information…won’t it be sad for God to show you in heaven how much seed you sat on while you were here on earth?”

I nearly choked as I had just the days before taken all my notebooks from the shelf and gone through them to consider if anything in them could be used for anything. The notebooks had sat on my shelf for months (years, if you count different shelves and cupboards) and now they lay in a heap on my floor. I had been stepping over them for the past two days and was actually about to put them all back on the shelf. I felt unqualified, and frankly, a bit silly.

Just then, a friend messaged me about a sermon she was listening to about unused seed and we quickly worked out it was the same sermon. I messaged her back immediately: ‘They’re not on the shelf anymore, they’re on my floor!’

I bought the domain name that night.

I was brave and I built this site. I started putting up my own writing and familiar feelings of fear and embarrassment came back. So I would stop for a while, and then something would happen and I would share again. Or something else would happen and fear would make me stop again.

So, I have got a little braver, but I’m still not very brave yet.