Celebrate!

Today is my Grandma’s birthday, and she’s going to have a surprise. I think it’s fine to write about it in this blog, even though the blog will post before her surprise has happened. After all, if my Grandma checks Facebook/the internet, I’ll be the one getting a surprise!

Grandma thinks she is going out for lunch with a few members of the family.  What she doesn’t know is that, in fact, almost her entire family will be there, including all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

All the family are different.  Some more chatty than others, some funnier than others (or so they like to think), some more active than others…you get the point. But we all want to be there to celebrate Grandma.

It made me think of ACW.  When I joined, I thought it would be nice to connect with some other Christian writers.  What I didn’t know is that a whole community would be there.

I know we are all different.  We write in different styles, different genres. Some of us are more chatty than others, more active than others. But, in my time as an admittedly less chatty member, if I had to sum up in one word the sense I get from the ACW Facebook group, ‘support’ would come very close.  

But it wouldn’t quite win. 

‘Celebration’ would pip it to the post.

People’s achievements are celebrated, every day. 

We rejoice with each other.

We also commiserate with each other. 

Writing can be tough and there are down times as well as up.  

So should I change my ‘summing up ACW’ word? Perhaps celebration isn’t quite right. 

Or perhaps it is. 

One of the joys, to me, of ACW is that, through each other, we are enabled to realise that the down times aren’t the end of the world.  There will always, more than likely, be someone who can say, ‘yes, I’ve been there, and I know it’s tough, but it doesn’t last forever’.  

And I think that’s something to celebrate, don’t you?!

I hope my Grandma likes her surprise even half as much as I like the surprise of discovering the ACW community.  More than that, I hope she is blessed as we celebrate her today, just as I am blessed through ACW.

So thank you all, so much.  Let’s keep celebrating each other’s ups and downs, knowing that we, too, are celebrated.

What one word would you use to sum up ACW?