Daily writing prompt

What’s one habit that has improved your life the most?

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The habit that has improved my life the most is writing.

That sounds simple enough, but I don’t think it is simple at all.

Writing almost every day has improved my life in ways I probably didn’t fully understand when I started doing it. It keeps my mind active. It makes me notice things. It forces me to take the scattered thoughts, worries, memories, questions, frustrations and blessings bouncing around inside my head and give them some kind of shape.

And when I say writing keeps my mind active, that is not a small thing to me.

I used to be terrified of cancer because I saw what my mother went through. But I have since seen dementia close-up, too, and that fear runs even deeper. Anything I can do to keep my mind engaged matters to me. Brain games, reading, writing every day — some of that is discipline, some of it is joy, and some of it is self-preservation.

But writing does more than exercise my mind.

Writing about spiritual things helps keep me grounded with the Lord. That is the part that matters most. When I sit down to write about faith, I cannot simply drift through the day on emotion or reaction. I have to stop and think about what is true. I have to come back to Scripture. I have to ask where God is in the middle of whatever I am seeing, feeling or remembering.

And somewhere in that process, gratitude keeps showing up.

I am constantly reminded of how much I have and how blessed I truly am. That doesn’t mean life is always easy or that every day feels full of sunshine and answered prayers and neatly tied bows. But it does mean there is always something to see if I’m willing to look closely enough.

I think I learned that from my mother.

My conversations with her had a way of pulling my eyes away from myself. She reminded me, sometimes directly and sometimes just by the way she lived, that I should spend more time thinking about my effect on others than about how everything affects me.

That’s not an easy lesson to live out. I still fail at it more often than I would like. But it is one of the greatest gifts she gave me.

When I think about the greatest gifts in my life, my salvation comes first. Nothing else matters without that.

After that, my mother is right there near the top. Not because she was perfect, but because she pointed me toward what mattered. She gave me faith, music, words, tenderness and a way of seeing people that I am still trying to live up to.

Then come Lizzi and Daryl, tied together in my heart in very different ways. One is my daughter, one is my wife, and both have shaped my life more than I can measure.

Then my grandchildren, who have opened up whole new rooms in my heart I did not know were there.

And somewhere on that list is the ability to write.

I do not place writing there because I think I am especially important as a writer. I place it there because writing has become one of the ways God helps me understand my own life. It is how I remember, how I process, praise and confess. It’s how I grieve and how I laugh. Writing is how I try to make sense of things that do not always make sense.

Writing has improved my life because it keeps me from sleepwalking through it.

It makes me look again. It makes me say thank you.

And on the best days, it helps me look outward instead of inward — which is probably what my mother was trying to teach me all along.