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Who am I?

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Image by Alisa Dyson from Pixabay I was fourteen when I first read Psalm 139. That was when my father handed me my adoption file, which contained my adoption certificate and a series of letters from the secretary of the adoption society. I already knew my birth name (not all adoptees of my generation were lucky enough to have that information). I didn’t find out the names of my biological parents until I was 34. That was when I embarked on my search for my birth mother, the best decision I ever made. My birth mother was from South East London, where my adoptive family had also lived, but she moved to Northern Ireland in 1963, the year after she gave birth to me and gave me up for adoption, and she never left. She had four more children. I’m the eldest. In my adoptive family, I’m the middle daughter. In July 1990, I was staying with friends in Northern Ireland. That was a hot summer, the country was baking in a heatwave, and the peaceful hills and fields of County Down seem
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It Is Finished (is it though?)

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               Picture credit: JustWatch Hi everyone. Thanks for reading. I hope you get to the end and finish my little thought for the day. I’d like to start with some thanks to my team. Thanks to my friend Lee for providing the spark of a thought that led to this piece. Thanks to the admin team at ACW without whom this blog would not exist. Thanks to Rosemary Johnson for encouraging me to start and explaining the logistics. Thanks to Susan Sanderson who faithfully posts links to the blog. Thanks to all the other MTW contributors. I think we make a great team. Why am I talking about teams instead of getting on with my blog? For many writers, I imagine their favourite two words are ‘ the end’ , but for me that can seem like a long way off.  Back in the ’80s I liked a band called Petra. This was one of my favourites. And the sky grew black as the night (It is finished) And the people scattered in fright The work had been done, redemption had been won The war was over without a f
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Great Marketing

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                                                                                                              Photo by Pixabay   I recently went for a physio appointment at our local hospital.  After parking the car, and the usual chaos sorting out the payment, I rushed through the car park and there, right beside the main entrance, was the most colourful, outstanding bookstall I had ever seen.  The bright orange marquee stood out, like a spaceship had just landed.  The tables were covered in the most beautifully illustrated children’s books. I just had to stop, even though I knew it would make me a few minutes late for my appointment.    I chatted briefly to the gentleman behind the tables, who had started putting the books away in boxes, so I picked up a couple and they were so easy and very pleasant to read.  The gentleman told me that he was in fact the author of the books.  There were 6 different titles, and they all related to tigers.  I said I would go to my appointment and buy
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Hold Your Horses!

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Being a child-minder means that I get to spend lots of time with very young children.  It also means that God sometimes has a funny way of speaking to me.  Recently, I’ve been trying to make headway with a chapter book I started a few years ago.  For all sorts of reasons, it has taken me much longer than I ever anticipated to make any real progress.   The last three years have been particularly hectic.  Trying to juggle a 40-hour working week, be a parent to four children, keep on top of house chores, do a weekly grocery shop, plus walk the dog on my days off, often means that my ‘free-time’  gets swallowed up.    There have also been some really difficult personal circumstances that have weighed heavy on me. Is it any wonder that when I do sit down at the keyboard, my brain is often too frazzled to write? Sometimes I get discouraged at my lack of progress.  Sometimes, I wrongly focus on what I haven’t managed to achieve, rather than what I have.  I fall into the comparison trap.  Othe
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When Life Gets In The Way Of Writing...

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As I considered what to write about in this blog post, I struggled. Thinking back over the last month, I couldn’t help feeling like a bit of a failure as a writer. A single blog post plus an outline for a blog series I hope to write for Advent was all I had managed to achieve.       I had begun October with good intentions, but then life happened.       A particularly busy spell at work combined with a viral infection, then supporting a friend who is struggling, had left me lacking in both physical and mental energy, so writing had to take a back seat.       I think it’s important to recognise there are times when that’s okay. As the title of this blog reminds us, we are “more than writers.” There is a time to push ahead with our writing projects, and there is a time to give ourselves grace. We are only human, our time is limited, and there are seasons when our priorities need to change.       As I reflected some more, I also realised that while I may not have made much progres
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Writing Priorities - What comes First?

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Credited to E Langford  Writing for the first of each month, I guess it was highly likely at some stage I’d reference the classic puzzle, ‘What comes first, the chicken or the egg?’  The phrase could be translated for writers as what comes first, the fully formed entity or the embryonic idea. It follows on from my recent posts that have asked what comes first in driving your writing, such as the desire to write or the desire for success. In these posts I mentioned that I wrote myself a ‘commission’ when I was exploring freelance writing in 2002, and this has driven me to revisit it. The original document dedicated my writing to God in response to the exciting opportunities that opened up before me. The commission offered these gifts back to God while also acting as a check and balance as I considered what to say in the public domain. Although the principles are still true, when I read the document, I felt it wasn’t right for where I am now. As I did so, the puzzle above came to
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