It’s reveal time.  The name of my blog is “The Secret Life of a Scrappy Wife,”  so I suppose it’s time to start revealing some secrets.  Here it goes….

Secret #1

My handwriting is terrible, and it just doesn’t matter.

For real, my handwriting is awful.  I progressed to about a second grade level and then just stopped improving.  When I was growing up, so many girls had gorgeous, bubbly, unique handwriting, and mine has always looked like the work of an average 7 year old.  My hand aches when I write because I hold the pen wrong and grip it like someone is trying to rip it from my hands.  It’s rough.

Cursive?  Sure, I can write in cursive!  But, I don’t know about you, it takes so much brain power for me to remember how to correctly form all those letters, its barely worth the end result.  I misspell way more words when I am writing in cursive.  Why?  Who knows, but it definitely happens.

So many scrapbookers and Bible journalers lament online about their handwriting.  They say it is awful, ugly, and just not fit to put on their pages.  The solution?  Typing it out on a computer or type-writer, gluing it in the pages of their books, and removing their handwritten work completely from their pages.  There are so many stamps for dates, expressions, and sentiments, it is barely necessary to have any version of your own writing in your projects at all.  In a society where texting and emails are far more common than a handwritten card or note, our handwriting is slowly disappearing from our world completely.  Geez, I even keep my grocery list on my phone…no need to write it out!

I’m here to encourage all of you to stop hiding your writing.

Why are we making these projects?  More specifically, WHO are we making them for?  When I Bible journal, it is time spent with God.  Time that I spend praying, meditating, and reflecting on scripture.  Or just time spent in God’s presence, with my mind quieted and my hands busy.  I know that God doesn’t care what my writing looks like.  I’m pretty sure God doesn’t need help reading my illegible chicken scratch, considering He knows the inner workings of my heart, not to mention the number of hairs on my head!  What He wants to see are my sincere thoughts, and the true work of my hands.

My memory-keeping projects are not created for Pinterest or Instagram (although you know I LOVE a gorgeous instagram pic!).  Nope, they are a record of my family, a snap-shot of our lives in that moment.  They are my thoughts, feelings, and stories, recorded so that they can be remembered and shared in the future.  What better way to preserve those memories than with my own handwriting?

Have you ever looked at a relative’s old journal?  Held your grandmother’s Bible in your hands and run your fingers across her writing?  Treasured hand-written notes that your great-grandfather jotted down on the back of a photograph?  Did you judge their handwriting?  Of course not!  Those are treasured keepsakes, small mementos left by our loved ones that evoke special memories.

I want my children to look back at our family scrapbooks and my Bible journals with those same sentiments.  It’s not only the pages and words that matter, but the hands that created them.  Does that mean that I never type my journaling, use stamped sentiments, or cover a page with alpha stickers?  Of course not!  And would I love to spend some time working on my lettering skills?  Of course!  That’s just not a priority for me right now.  In the mean time, I refuse to limit my projects to only what looks pretty.  I will continue to strive for heartfelt and authentic work, bad handwriting and all.

What are you going to write on today?

 

Keep it creative,

-The Scrappy Wife