Life Stories and Family Recollections by Trevor Thorn

It’s Saturday evening the day before I'm due to put up my monthly contribution to this, the ACW blog.
I’ve been bouncing several ideas around in my mind but today’s events have reminded both my wife, Pam, and me of a conference she attended some years ago when the delegates were encouraged to write down their life stories - not for publication, even though for some, this might develop into publishable material.

It was a family birthday party that triggered this recollection and reminded us of the benefits of doing this. Among them we recollected:

• That there are therapeutic benefits of looking back at our personal histories and revisiting the high-spots which can give rise to a sense of thanksgiving. Seeing the less good occasions with the benefits of hindsight and reminders of what helped at those times can also be helpful’
• The possibility of helping future generations to understand a bit more about why some things happened the way they did. 
• The likelihood of our own life story yielding themes and ideas we can explore in our wider writing and thereby giving these a touch of authenticity.
• That making an informal record  may give rise to insights we had never had before which  may be of help to others.
• It can be particularly helpful to record instances that have had a healing influence within our family or community.

And, let’s face it, those of us who aspire to be writers ought to be among the more competent to make our life-stories interesting or intriguing or even compelling reading, which can also be an excellent opportunity for making our faith-stories come alive!

This will undoubtedly have to feature

 in my/our life story: the day

we celebrated the end of my radiotherapy

back in April 2017.

If you are interested, 

by clicking HERE you will see

 the first of four entries

 that follow our journey through my cancer.