A Smile on My Face

It has been that kind of day--the kind that starts early and goes late. It wasn’t bad, just busy. I left home at 7:45 am and arrived back at 1 pm. I spent a few moments on following up some connections from Sunday morning and headed out for a time of mission prayer. I was back at 4 pm, just in time to head out for dinner and a movie. As I begin to write, it is 7:45 pm., twelve hours after my day began.

A day like today makes it extra hard to keep the commitment I made to post to my blog every day. It isn’t for want of trying. Throughout the day, ideas for topics bubbled to the surface, then sank out of sight before I could cast my line and reel them in.

Perhaps the real lesson for the day is commitment. I made the commitment to post to my blog, not to offer some well-written life lesson. I think the commitment was for my benefit alone, an exercise in obedience to an increasingly persistent nudge to write.

I’d like to think my example resulted in the wonderful email I received mid-day from a young woman I dearly love. She emailed me a copy of her own blog post, one written expressly for a group of which she is a part. She asked me to avert my English teacher eyes as I read it because it was a piece from her heart and not a publishable essay.

It wouldn’t have occurred to me to correct her grammar, her spelling or her syntax. I know how busy this young mother is, plus it was very acceptably written. More importantly, the message she conveyed was so much more important than its literary style.

Truthfully her decision to email me her post had nothing to do with my own commitment to write daily. I don’t think she even knows about it. The choice to share reflects the strength and beauty of a relationship that thrives on revealing and receiving. This open exchange of our hearts is a commitment that is far more valuable that writing something every day—just to say I did it.

Today was a long day, filled with work and pleasure, people and prayer. At the end of the day it is the tenderly revealed heart of a friend that is putting a smile to my face.