BARBARANNE KELLY | CONTRIBUTOR

The passage of time is a funny thing. We mark anniversaries with amazement at how the years have flown by. The first time I attended the annual Leadership Training (LT) in 2017 seems like yesterday in some respects, and forever ago in others. That year, Karen Hodge and Christina Fox introduced us to a new resource for the women of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), the enCourage Blog, which had launched the year before. I attended the writers’ workshop, where Christina told us more about enCourage, and that she was looking for more women to write for it. In our brave new digital world, there are so many offerings for women to read, many which are genuinely faith-feeding and many more which are discouraging, fear-feeding, or enticements away from true faith. The purpose of enCourage is to be a bi-weekly dose of truly biblical life-giving encouragement in a world that is often filled with bad news.

A month after my first LT, I submitted my very first post for enCourage and have since become a regular contributor. When Christina asked for a post this month celebrating enCourage’s ten-year anniversary, my first thought was, “Wait—ten years already?” Yes, ten years of encouragement written by women of the PCA for the women of the PCA have flown by! In the nine years I’ve written for enCourage I have learned and grown as a writer, particularly in my confidence in my calling to write, in honing my skills as a writer, and in the mutual encouragement among my fellow writers and our readers.

I first stumbled into blogging many long years ago when I tried to comment on a friend’s blog post and accidentally signed up for a blog of my own (it was confusing). My little blog began as a family news bulletin but gradually grew into devotional thoughts inspired by the normal events of daily life. If I had any regular readers, they were a small handful of faithful friends and my Auntie Dear who lived way away in Texas. One evening at our small group, I mentioned something that I’d written and a friend who didn’t know about my blog asked me about it, and if anybody read it. When I told her I didn’t know, she laughed and asked, “Well, why do you write it?”

Indeed, why do I write? It may be a stretch to say with Jeremiah that, “there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot” (Jer. 20:9), and yet, there are times when it feels like exactly like that. While not claiming Spirit-inspiration for my writing on a Scriptural level—far from it—I can now say with confidence that I know this is something God has called me to do. One means of confirming a call in the church is whether others recognize and affirm that calling. Being asked to write for enCourage has confirmed this for me. Personally, I would rather hide under a rock than stand up and say such a bold thing about myself, but through this blog platform I’ve found it to be true. The Lord has called me and every woman who writes for enCourage to write.

However, being called to write didn’t mean I was good at it. When I began writing for enCourage, it was the first time since school that someone else had evaluated my writing. With my own blog, I had the freedom to ramble on endlessly, compose redundant paragraphs, and blunder grammatically without correction.

Enter Christina Fox.

With precision and grace, Christina took up her metaphorical editor’s scalpel pen and reigned me in. Word count limits forced me to focus and tighten my thoughts. Single spaces between sentences made paragraphs easier to read. Being assigned different topics gave me opportunities to explore themes I might not have otherwise. Under her gentle guidance, asking questions where I wasn’t clear and making suggestions where needed, Christina has helped me to become a better writer.

Finally, If I’m called to write, then it follows that I’m to share this gift with others. The enCourage platform reaches far more readers than my own blog, extending the reach of my words beyond my handful of faithful friends and my Dear Auntie. In these past nine years, more readers have found their way to my blog through enCourage, I’ve been invited to write for other blogs, and Tim Challies has shared some of my enCourage posts (and others’) to his own wider audience. I know that I and my fellow enCourage writers have been deeply encouraged by the response to our offerings posted here.

Writing for enCourage is one way that I and my fellow writers share our gifts to serve the church, as good stewards of God’s grace, by the strength that God has supplied to each of us, in order that through these blog posts God may be glorified through Jesus Christ (1 Peter 4:9:–11).  When we write and when Christina hits “publish,” our shared aim is to point our readers not to ourselves, but to Christ. Because we have obtained salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, it is our aim to “encourage one another and build one another up” (1 Thess. 5:9–11) with biblical truth and encouragement through our words, sent out each Monday and Thursday. May the Lord continue to make it so, to the glory and praise of His grace.

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash