Grace in the Mundane – an update

by Gloria Furman

I’m a verbal processor who needs to have something to write on.

I was that little girl who always kept a diary hidden somewhere in her room. Once I kept my diary in a Popple, a stuffed animal with a kangaroo-like pocket. Most of my childhood diaries have been lost in time, but I still have a few of them in a box in my closet.

Writing was a part of my daily life. When I quit my initial hospitality management major at university and sat in the academic counselor’s office I was at a total loss for what I wanted to do with my education.

She wisely advised me, “Well, we don’t want you to drop out. What classes did you enjoy in high school? I recommend that you register for classes that you will at least attend.” So I signed up for a degree in writing. Whether or not my formal education in writing was productive is yet to be determined. But at least I went to class and graduated.

For years I persevered in a near-daily journaling habit until April 4, 2007. That was the last entry I wrote in a book-style journal. (I’m figuring that updating your Facebook status doesn’t count as journaling.)

My water broke on the evening of April 4th, and several hours later I was holding our first child in my arms. It’s kinda sad that I stopped journaling right then at a time when it would have been healthy to write down what I was thinking. Granted, most of my journaled thoughts would have sounded something like,

“Thursday, November 14. Where was I? Oh right. I was writing. I am so insanely tired and lonely and… Where was I? Oh right. Baby’s waking up.”

But at least I would have been disciplined to process my thoughts and emotions on a daily basis.

This summer I shared with someone that I’ve felt like my brain and heart have been “backed up” for several years. Every so often I would write something thoughtful on our family blog, and that process was helpful to me. But even so, as someone who is so driven by words and writing, I still felt like I was verbally constipated.

Thanks to this book project for Crossway, many late evenings for the past several months have been taken up by some of the most intense journaling I’ve done in a long time.

Yesterday I typed the last couple hundred words for the first draft of Grace in the Mundane: applying the gospel in your home.

That’s why things were kinda quiet last week here at Domestic Kingdom. Thanks for your patience!

I appreciate your prayers for this whole process as I put the book on the editing chopping block. It’s time to go back over everything from the Introduction to the Conclusion and cut out all the rambling that only made sense to me after overdosing on dates and coffee!