As you’ll read below, I’m taking a blogging break through Pentecost (May 19).

SilverDollars1

Dear friends,

Here in the middle of Lent, I find myself exhausted and shattered. I look in the mirror, and I see…ugly. It’s deeper than my cracked and blemished skin. It’s my cracked and blemished soul; it’s the words that rise up from that broken place within that have broken me these past weeks.

For Lent, I embraced the practice of speaking only kind words, only true words. I knew it would be hard. I had no clue how hard. Every day, I have failed. Every hour of every day, except when I’m sleeping, I have failed. And even when my words are okay, my tone is not. It cuts—and I’m the one who’s bleeding most.

As I struggle my way through this Lenten practice of watching my tongue, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to write. Perhaps that’s because of this practice; or perhaps it’s because I feel tired and tattered; or perhaps it’s simply because I am giving so much all the time (there are these four kids in my life, after all, and they need me), and I am depleted.

Whatever the reason, I am going to take these next weeks to sit with my thoughts and with God without any pressure to publish. I am, in other words, taking a break from blogging. A long one: until Pentecost. It scares me, for many reasons, this letting go of my blog for so long, but that’s partly why I feel it’s the right thing to do. At the very least, it feels like something I need to do. To let myself rest and read and write without having to write anything decent, let alone good.

I want to say a deep and heartfelt thank you to each of you who visit my site each week. That you would spend time reading what I write—this is a gift to me. You are the reason I have hung on here as long as I have. Thank you.

With deepest gratitude,
Kimberlee

P.S. I have commitments to other sites each month (Godspace, A Deeper Church, and Tweetspeak Poetry), and I will continue to uphold those, so if you really want to, you can catch up with me there. I may or may not crosspost those links from here when they go live, but at the very least I’ll retweet or share them on Twitter and Facebook.