Noticing Newbies

Hello. I am going to tell you just how I ended up here:

I was googling on January 17th. I want my life to be different and I was trying to find folks who had turned their lives around when at the "midpoint" . . . it isn't easy to google that . . .

Through my search, I stumbled onto some of Oldwarrior's writing . . . after reading several pieces in his portfolio, I read his "bio" excerpt and decided to send him an email.

He definitely did not sound like what I was trying to google . . . as I read about Oldwarrior, he seemed like the epitome of success to me . . . certainly googling is not an exact science.

Why was I trying to find info about folks who had turned their lives around after the "midpoint"?

I am 56. My life lacks the external trappings of success. I am a Christian. The inside of my cup looks a whole lot better than it ever would have looked without God in my life. The outside - not so good.

I want something different for the rest of my life. I don't know how to make that happen.

I was looking for others who had made that kind of change at my age so that I might see how they had done it and perhaps follow their example.

But instead, I found Oldwarrior. He graciously replied to my inquiry (which was actually almost verbatim what I have written here). Up to this point in my life, he is the most successful person with whom I have ever directly interacted. I believe that even just that one email exchange is going to have a profound affect on my life.

In his reply, he offered several suggestions. They were the kind of suggestions that would be appropriate for almost anyone to follow . . . which makes sense because all he knew about me was what I have written above. In his last comment, he thanked me for reading his work on this site, mentioned folks that he had met here and stated that I could join the site.

As I read his email, I did not give that suggestion serious thought. I was not thinking about becoming a writer/author. I was thinking about the "trappings of failure" in my life and the desire to have something different in my future. I was also wishing that I had a mentor to help me . . . I even emailed him to ask him if he would consider being that kind of a mentor to me. He did NOT reply to that email . . . I hope that he didn't think that I was a stalker or serial killer . . . I am not. I am just a stranger that wants something different from life.

HOWEVER, I have some health problems that have caused a drastic drop in my income. Because of this, I have been seeking God about what I can do to earn money in spite of my physical limitations. Before all this happened, I had actually believed that the Holy Spirit was prompting me to write. I am a nurse, it is within the realm of possibility that I could write some articles for peer-reviewed journals or something. It all sounds a bit outlandish to me. Other folks seem to write so much better than I do. I am smart enough to realize that developing something like that would take some doing. AND THEN it occurred to me that perhaps it was not just coincidental that my google search brought me by a circuitous route to Writing.com.

I decided that I would join . . . and started to do so . . . and chickened out . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and then got brave . . . decided to "risk it all" . . . and joined.


. . . I copied the psalm I had posted a while back on ChristianMingle and I posted it here.

. . . Immediately after I did so, I got an email that said: "Thank you for becoming an author!"

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .I will remember that moment the rest of my life.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ------------- ruwth