Mission Statement: To Seek and Share What's Beautiful.

Sunday, March 7, 2021


Photo by SPACEDEZERT on Unsplash


I think it’s time to update my mission statement, especially seeing as how I never really wrote one to begin with. Oops.

There’s an “About” page on this blog that comes pretty close, I think. But while it shares a little bit of my story and explains where I derived the name of this blog from, it doesn’t really describe what I want to do in an active, mission-oriented sort of way.

People talk a lot in the writing world about “serving your reader.” Who is your reader? What do they need? How can you encourage them?

For a long time, I didn’t know the answer to that question because I was writing just for me. Or for a person just like me: someone searching for her place in the world. I’d write whatever stirred up in my heart and hope that it would resonate with someone else, too. It wasn’t an unhelpful way of proceeding, but it did feel a little as though I was missing something. What does the world really need? I wondered. And how can I serve it?

I realized that at the heart of the encouragement I hoped to provide for others lay the determination to show people that this moment -- whatever anxieties or fears it might hold -- is not the end. That there is Resurrection hope and glory on the other side of the longing, of the mess, of the transition. That there is a surplus of beauty worth clinging to in this world.

Recently, I logged back on to Instagram after a months-long fast to find a single post from a college acquaintance named Georgie about how she was choosing to step out in bravery, trying this new blog writing thing and sharing her heart with the world. Encouraged by her “yes,” I reached out to see if she wanted to be writing accountability buddies -- or just writing friends, more generally speaking. She agreed, and we chatted for an hour one evening last week about inspiration, fighting lies and impostor syndrome, and living bravely: what it looks like to call forth the good in other people and in ourselves, to champion others’ success, and to see the world for all that still shimmers within it.

In listening to me share my own reasons for becoming a writer, Georgie repeated something to me that I had known intuitively but never really owned about myself: that my “theme” is seeking beauty and sharing it with other people. “What a time to be doing that!” she’d said. We need beauty now more than ever.

But really, there is never going to be a time when the world does not need beauty. I hear this call -- this cry -- issuing from every human heart, and I want this blog to be a space where it’s answered. Where the dreamers and the romantics and the storytellers can be satiated. Where we’re brave enough to cling to the promise of hope and joy in the middle of the mess, where we refuse to settle for the gloom and dismay that the world often peddles us instead. 

To seek and share what’s beautiful.

That is my mission. 

Join me?


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