I felt a call to write nine years before I actually started writing.

The call began in 2003 and continued to unfold year after year for nine years straight.

All those years I kept the call a secret, mostly to myself. To be completely honest, I didn’t even know if it was a call, so why share with anyone else? I thought I was imagining things, making believe things I wanted to do, to be. I thought maybe I was just dreaming, my ideas far flung, crazy, unrealistic, unattainable.

In 2010, I purchased a domain name and set up a blog titled “Perfectly Unbalanced Supermom.” I never wrote a single post on that blog. After letting it sit empty for two years, I let the domain expire.

In 2012, I realized I could no longer keep the content I’d been composing in my head to myself.

Someone wise counseled me – “It’s time to stop wondering if it’s a call and start figuring out what you’re going to do about it.” I’ll be forever grateful for that individual and their willingness to speak truth to me when I needed it most.

In July 2012, I launched my blog.

I made it clear to my husband that the intention of my blog was NOT to share cute updates about our family with friends and relatives. I didn’t want to just share sweet photos of my kids at the zoo and how we ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at the picnic table at the park. I didn’t want to just tell you we celebrated our daughter’s birthday. I didn’t want to just tell you that my husband and I went on a cruise and stopped at St. Thomas and Martinique and Cozumel. I wanted it to be more than that, much more than that.

I was clear about something else before I started. If, after one year of blogging, the only people that were reading my blog were my mom and my aunt, then I would NOT have achieved my goal. While I LOVE when my mom reads the blog, and I’d be honored if my aunts would pop in and read once in a while, I wanted to reach a larger audience. I wanted to move people beyond my immediate family. I wanted to make a difference in the life of someone who was just an acquaintance, someone I’d never met in real life at all.

16 months into blogging, I can tell you with confidence that I’ve met the goals I set for my first year! I’m allowing myself to dream, and I’m dreaming bigger and with greater clarity than ever. It’s a faith journey, and if I meet any of the long-term goals for my blog, it would be God’s doing, not my own. Because this path has no guarantees.

So I’m on my way, but I’m not finished yet. In fact, I’ve only just begun.

I come to you, my readers, for your wisdom, for your knowledge, for your insight. I want to know who you are, I want to know what you think, I want to know how I can help you best, I want to know what you think about my writing.

Because as much as I needed this blog for me, my long-term vision has much more to do with you.

So today, I’m launching my first Divine In The Daily Reader Survey! If all goes well, as planned, I’d like to survey my readers once a year, around this time right before Thanksgiving.

I’d be SO grateful if you’d take a few moments to click on the link and complete the reader survey. I’ve included a variety of questions to accommodate all of your different personalities. For the open-ended questions, feel free to write as little or as much as you’d like, or even leave a question blank if it doesn’t suit your style or mood today.

And rest assured, the survey is completely anonymous! 

To complete the Divine In The Daily Reader Survey, click here.

Thank you in advance for your time and thoughtful responses. Your feedback will help me move forward with even greater clarity, and for that I am appreciative.

Amy

In February 2007, long before Pinterest boards existed, I created a vision board as part of a Whole-Life Coaching course offered at Lifetime Fitness which you can see has since been punched through and written on with pens by one of my kids. In case you’ve never heard of a vision board, it’s a way to vision your best, most ideal life through a collage of pictures. In other words, if all of your God-Sized Dreams came true, this is what your life would look like.

On one side of my vision board I pasted fanciful visions of cruise ships, mission trips, nightly family dinners, Pottery Barn bedrooms, and extraordinary health and wellness. On the other side, a God-Sized Dream bigger than life. And in the center of that vision? A  woman smiling kindly and genuinely, captioned We’ve never chatted at the grocery store, but I’ll help save your life.

While I don’t believe there was anything magical about pasting cut-out magazine pictures on a piece of foam board six and a half years ago, I do believe God creates us uniquely and places purposes in each of our hearts. If we follow His promptings one by one, our dreams can become reality.

We’ve never chatted at the grocery store, but I’ll help save your life.

That picture in the center of my vision was big and bold and it meant something to me in February 2007, but I didn’t know why. In August 2010 I joined Twitter, and three years later as I look at that board, I know without a doubt that part of the vision has been fulfilled, is being fulfilled, daily. That photograph represents the family of soul sisters and brothers I have found through Twitter – a family of bloggers, authors, and all kinds of extraordinarily ordinary people that have become my special place, my hiding place, the place where my heart feels known. Where facades are stripped and souls remain, speaking truths of reality and beauty from pain. We understand each other completely through the sharing and baring of words. And this place where words connect the world – is where I belong.

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.  2 Corinthians 3:2-3

Amy