If Great Writers are Great Readers then I must be phenomenal, but I’m not. I am simply a great reader.

I have a 3rd grade education, yet I am a Bible college graduate. Connect those dots. Being pulled out of public school at the age of 8, I was fully unaware of the death of my furthering education. But I had books. So, I read. I read everything from the King James Bible to Roots with Kunta Kinte. I claimed to be smart. I claimed to have read Shakespeare and Dickens until I got convicted of lying. My options from there were to step up and claim my true, uneducated ignorance or read what I was claiming. So, I read. The humor and intelligence found within the pages of Much Ado About Nothing lured me into my claim in such a way that I simply could not escape. Shakespeare and Dickens became my educators alongside Alcott, Austen, and the very depth of all things Books.

If Great Writers are Great Observers of Life then I must be brilliant, but not quite. I am merely overly observant.

I am a statistic, yet I grew up in a Christian home. Connect those dots. Being lost in the pages of someone else’s words, I was able to disengage from the reality that entrapped me. As much as I dreamed a dream more than once in hopes that it would come true, my mother’s husband never left, died, or got flushed down a toilet. Hey, a child’s dream goes without explanation or rationalization at times. So, I observed my life within my glass box of “Christian home” without ever saying a word of truth to anyone. It is said that, “If you want to say a lot you have to have a lot to say.” For me, I had a lot to say, but I trusted no one with the words I was forbade to say. My newlywed husband listened to me before I even uttered a word. He stood beside me and fought for my verbal freedom in order to heal. Girlfriends unlocked little by little throughout the years. One friend knows one bit, and another knows another and all in all my girlfriends hold the dots that connect.

If Great Writers are Wrestlers with their own Struggles then it must be time to call the fight, but not yet. I am only just beginning.

Uneducated and unhealed, yet I published a Bible study on the book of Matthew. Dots that beautifully connected; my grammar was grade level, my sentence structure painful, but in the end, I found myself perfectly free. Where I was saved by His Grace at a young age, I was now healed by the Words of His human existence. I was the target reader of my own written observation. For me, my book was great, and I will forever be humbled and amazed at the journey that grew me to be the healed and set free woman I am today. I may have fought victoriously within my heart and mind, but I have abundant battles before me; grammar, structure, commas, clauses, etc… Even as I write this I giggle, cringe, and shrug, for all I can do is write according to what I know. Oh, how I desire to grow!