New Year

Hi and Happy New Year!  Come in and get warm.  It’s not too bad outside but it’s still not warm.  It is a bright and sunny start of the year.  That is always promising.  Grab what you’d like to drink and we have some peanut butter fudge or dark chocolate with sea salt caramel Ghirardelli squares for you to choose from.  I suggest the latter – they are my favorite.

I know people usually look at the new year and have all kinds of resolutions and hopes for what is to come.  I don’t have any resolutions this year.  I pretty much stopped doing that years ago.  Instead, I make changes day-to-day  to try to better my life and the impact I can make.  This year I do, however, have hope for the new year, even though I think it might be rough in the direction it looks to be heading.

In 2016, I received the number 30,000 related to my blog, but I had no idea what it meant.  Then, a couple of months ago a notice arrived saying that my blog had received 30,000 views on it.  That was huge for me.  I know it’s so minimal for most in the blogging world, but I was so surprised and humbled.

This year, I am supposed to take my writing to different places.  I’m not sure of the scope of this detail, but it’s kind of exciting and terrifying at the same time.  I look forward to all that is to come but putting my writing out in any way is hard.  It’s putting myself on paper and opening it up for everyone to read.  It’s very personal and it’s very one-sided.  I’ve had a couple of friends tell me they feel like we talk all the time because they read my posts and feel like they’ve caught up on my life.  But I’m not receiving their side of the conversation.  It’s all good but just something I have to get used to.  This is what I’ve been called to do and now to take it elsewhere.  That doesn’t mean I won’t be writing here.  God keeps giving me things to post on my blog.  It will be interesting to see where this takes me, but I still look forward to being with my blogging friends, too.

The other part of the new year is that I am being called to really face my feelings about all that has happened in my life.  I am a pro at pushing my feelings back, but doing this hasn’t been conducive to healing.  I started to write about the day I had to tell my boys their dad had died and it felt like it had just happened.  It was so raw.  After this much time, I think there should be some cushion on my response to retelling the story, but it doesn’t seem to be so.  It is also so hard to have a conversation about things anymore because, to others, this is really old news.  I feel like I see and hear “get on with it and get over it” when I talk to people.  I seriously doubt that most people actually think this, but it’s how I feel.  To me, so much of this is still so raw and fresh.  I hurt deeply, especially with the new issues that pop up because of the past.  This makes me want to NOT talk and share about my feelings even more.  Not only do I not want to share them, I don’t want to feel them.  But the time for this being a choice has evidently come to an end.  This will be so hard, but it’s what I’m being called to do.

So, what are your hopes and callings for the new year?  I’d love to hear about them.

~ Joanna Lynn

(Weekend Coffee Share is a part of Diana’s blog.  Stop by to check out her blog and spend some time with other amazing bloggers.)