Put it Down in Words

Words.

Words are how I convey ideas.  Words are how I communicate to others my thoughts and feelings on a given subject.  Words are how I convey my story.  Others sing, paint, even dance.  I do it by writing you a story.  I experience something.  That something can be new; it can be old, or somewhere in between.  Then when that experience is over and done, I come back here and I write.  I put it down in words so that you can experience something.  That is my goal at least.  If a thought strikes me, or something happens to me,  I put it down into words so that it may make you laugh, think or maybe even feel a tinge of sadness.

Writing is an art.  It requires precision.  You need to be able to convey your thoughts and feelings on a subject so that your audience can see clearly what happened.  It's like a window, you look through it, watching.  You're not there.  But you feel like you are there.  You know what is happening in that moment.

But this story... this story is difficult.  How can you describe it?  It was a roller coaster.  I have never experienced so much in so little.  The End of the Year Gathering was something I will never forget.  I doubt that if someone wrote a five-hundred-page novel they could capture what we experienced last week.  The simplicity of it and yet the complexity of it is astounding.

I think the best analogy for it is a roller coaster.  You arrive the first night, and you experience joy. Simple joy.  Then, at the very end, you experience a sadness that seems to take a piece of your heart and refuse to give it back.  And in the in-between time you get a little taste of different emotions that you didn't think were possible to experience in such a short breadth of time.

At the Gathering, our student-body president, Collin Smith, spoke to us about stories.  We need to be willing to make our own story.  After all..  Life is a story.  God is a storyteller, and it is only appropriate that, since we are made in His image, we should imitate His story-telling.  Even if it is a broken picture of a wonderful Masterpiece.

Last week was a tapestry with different stories woven into it.

We made our own story there.

And this is my attempt to put it down into words...

(PC: Sarah Diesing)  The crew looking dapper.
(Don't worry.  I'll be doing another post mostly dedicated to stories and pictures from the Gathering.)