Being Shaped; Shaping others by Tracy Williamson

When I was a child and other children were finding their excitement in visiting adventure playgrounds and theme parks, the library was the place to go for me.  To be surrounded by shelves of books that I'd be free to burrow into, search out, discover and possess was a joy that I'd anticipate all week. I didn't realise it then but I was tapping into the awesome power of words to shape us, to create a path for our minds to tiptoe along, to put form on nebulous ideas and to provide a wonderful escape.
Shaping us, developing our understanding, our awareness of things we do not know or have not experienced....
Being a 60's child I was born into the Enid Blyton era and soon learnt to immerse myself in the lands of adventure and fun.  The Magic Faraway Tree became my own way of escape from a chaotic and scary home life and I would go to our little corner of Epping Forest and try to climb into my own magical worlds where there would always be a solution to a moment of danger or misadventure.  The fact that the children were meeting and becoming great friends with such characters as MoonFace, The Angry Pixie and Saucepan Man instilled in me the beginnings of an awareness that people can be different yet still be wonderful friends.  Our society rests on an unwritten rule that people need to fit in and be alike and those who stand out as different are often on the fringe.  I was on the fringe myself and bullied at school for being slow learning although I was in fact deaf but that was unknown then.  Through Enid Blyton's books I found not just escape but hope, hope that there would be note worthy things I could do just as the Famous Five and Secret Seven managed to do.  Hope that one day I would be part of a group that accepted me and that there would be a happy ending.  As I grew older, Arthur Ransome's stories of the Swallows and Amazon's and Willard Price's of the two young naturalists Hal and Roger all had an impact.  I was so sheltered on one hand and so exposed to crushing rejection and abuse on the other, that I had no concept of the fact that I was destined to grow into someone who could take on responsibility and discover life  and influence others. But these stories began to shape that desire that I could indeed become such a person. 

  At a time when I had no understanding of God and my moral awareness was becoming skewed because of my home life, the Chalet School books became a new source of growth and shaping. God, faith and moral, ethical solutions were part of the fabric of these wonderful stories and gave me a more far reaching view and a budding yearning for such a faith myself, whether that was in goodness or God I didn't know, but God was definitely using these works in ways I only later understood. Similarly classics like The Little Princess, The Secret Garden, Black Beauty, Little Women, Heidi and Dickens all had an impact.  Windows began to open within me, an awareness that yes life is hard and can be very cruel and yet there is love, goodness, faith, adventure, respect, hope, selflessness, care, trust, and the possibility of a good ending.
I guess some of the profoundest influences came through the Narnia stories by CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth. It was through these that the knowledge kindled within me that I too, just like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings or Lucy, Susan, Peter and Edmund in the Narnia stories had a destiny and a choice.  I could let myself be overcome by the evil I had known or rise up and be an agent, even in my weakness, of seeing evil conquered by good.  A passion was born within me to be a defender of the good and the lovely and to believe that I did have a part to play in the great cosmic battle between good and evil.  When I became a Christian at 19 and discovered that the battle between good and evil is real yet through Jesus I am on the winning side I felt a great joy and a kind of clicking into place of all those earlier influences.
I am full of thanks to every author of the written word in both my childhood and adult years and for the immeasurable impact of their works on my life and the lives of countless others.
Let's never forget the power and responsibility we have as writers to affect, even to shape the lives of others, our children, our communities even our world. I would love to think that something I have written has provided a safety net or given a budding understanding or hope or a new perspective or drawn my reader closer to God.  It may feel sometimes like just another deadline to meet, just another blog that no one will read, but God sees the bigger picture and if just one person is helped by something I've written then something beautiful for the Kingdom of Heaven has been released.  We are all shaped by the words we read and all destined to shape others by the words we write


Tracy Williamson lives in Tonbridge, Kent with her great friend and ministry partner Marilyn Baker and Tracy's Hearing Dog, Goldie.  Tracy is an author and speaker  working with Marilyn for MBM Trust an itinerant music and teaching ministry. www.mbm-ministries.org  Tracy's latest book The Father's Kiss was published in Sept 18 by Authentic Media and she is currently completing a 40 day devotional A Desert Transformed.