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Harmony Moore's avatar

I remember distinctly the first time I read your words, Lore. It was a rainy winter afternoon in 2017 and I was holed up on the drafty sunporch of a bungalo-turned-coffee-shop called Maplewood in northwest Portland, OR. My mother was fighting for her life a few miles away after a bone marrow transplant, I'd just moved my family of 8 across the continent to care for her, my body and heart and mind were breaking down, and my writing had come to a standstill. I don't know how I ended up on Sayable but I spent hours reading through every post I could. You were writing theology with a courage and honesty, with a love for the church but a greater love for Jesus, and I thought, "I've found a friend. I've found someone who shares my heart and, so unusually, seems to share my vantage point." Not that we agreed on everything, but there was something about the heartbeat of your words with the love for beauty, the depth of theology, the weaving together of different disciplines in a slow, purposeful, thoughtful way.

I've read every post you've written since then, and that sentiment has stayed the same. I deeply appreciate you and the work you do.

At the height of my writing-for-public I tried the social media thing and failed miserably. It was so far outside my gifting and skillset. Writing beautiful words, in a beautiful space, with generosity and love--that I could do. My 100 or so readers scattered throughout the world who consistently let me know how much my words meant to them? That mattered. But the mad dash of social media? That was a no for me. That was death. And so I chose to write quietly and faithfully on my own website until life pressed down in such a way that required a very long public silence. Now the words are humming, stirring, inviting me into them again, and I'm encouraged to see that so many writers, so many wordsmiths, are rejecting the mad dash of how things have been in the last decade or so and are reclaiming ground so that depth, thoughtfulness, beauty, and artistry can flourish. Thank you for being a voice for this shift.

I will say I paused over this sentence: "if no one is showing up to read what you write that perhaps you are not called to write". Perhaps. Also, perhaps, in that case, one may not be called to make a living off of writing, or one may not be called to shepherd a broad pasture of readers, or one may be in a long season of prepping the soil. Because sometimes, if no one shows up to read what you write and the words still burn within you, if you are not a whole person unless you write them, if the Holy Spirit is saying "be faithful, be faithful, be faithful" and you can't do anything but write and your writing is always for others even as it is for you...then no one showing up to read ends up being its own paradoxical confirmation that writing is, indeed, a calling.

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Stephen Bradford Long's avatar

It wasn’t until I found Substack that I realized I’ve been something of a refugee on social media, trying to force myself into a medium that didn’t fit.

Thanks for writing this piece

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