Last week was the one-year anniversary of the total eclipse of 2024. Many times of late have I wished that it were an annual event.
It was truly a day I’ll never forget. I live in Northeast Ohio, right in the heart of totality, and my parents and I went on a bike ride out to a relatively unpopulated area to witness it.
It was a display of God’s majesty, grandeur, and power that left me utterly humbled and grateful that the Lord Jesus Christ, the agent by which all things were made and who holds all things together, not only controls the heavenly bodies with such precision but became a man in order to be the atonement for sin on my behalf.
It wasn’t just an awe-inspiring natural phenomenon. It was a graphic, overwhelming picture of His love for me.
Over the past year, I’ve often considered writing about the eclipse beyond these basic facts. However, the above paragraphs are the closest I’ve ever come.
There are experiences that are so sacred they resist being captured in words. It's not a matter of lacking the right words. It’s more about having a deep sense of reverence that prevents their immediate transcription.
I’ve been contemplating this over the past month as I’ve considered writing about some recent personal experiences. Ultimately, however, I decided against it. In these instances, what happened was too close to me—not just to share in an essay but to write about just for myself.
As a result, I find myself reflecting on how powerful experiences can sometimes push back against a writer’s urge to dive into them and create something.
In February, I went to the winter writer’s retreat put on by The Habit. In one of his talks during the event, Jonathan Rogers talked about the importance of paying attention and being present for writers.
One point we discussed is that there is wisdom in waiting to put things into words. In a previous post, I wrote about how this was true for many of the essays in my new book, Why I Dyed My Hair Purple and Other Unorthodox Stories.
If you write about something too soon, you risk sharing deeply personal things in a half-baked manner, failing to give your experiences the dignity they deserve, and possibly hurting others in the process.
There are a lot of warnings against writing about something before you are ready. However, I have yet to see someone issue a warning against writing about something too late.
In this session at the retreat, we discussed how writing about something too soon risks crystallizing it into language before it has the opportunity to do its full internal work.
Once you put it into words, either written or spoken to others, it starts to lose its mystery. It stops being something that can move and shift in your soul.
This in no way means that capturing experiences with language is bad, but when we move to capture it too quickly, we short-circuit the personal impact it can have.
Annie Dillard explores this idea in The Writing Life, explaining, “The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere.”
When you give an experience or idea time to settle into your being, it becomes less about what happened to you and more about what the experience formed in you.
There is wisdom here for how our writing also impacts our Christian testimonies. Earlier this year, I wrote a piece about how to write about spiritual abuse with grace rather than bitterness. Spiritual trauma figures in several essays from Why I Dyed My Hair Purple, and while it was vital for me to tell the truth about how difficult church experiences impacted me, it was important for me to write about it in a way that would not be vengeful or unforgiving.
Being seven years removed from the events worked in my favor. So did working through them with a biblical counselor and discovering that holding onto bitterness like a cold, dirty blanket was making things worse. If I’d tried to write about what happened to us sooner and without this sound counsel, the end product would have been very different.
I’m not saying I’ve arrived or that my writing process is the standard for this type of thing . . . but I’m disturbed by how many Christians rush to put explorations of spiritual trauma or outright rage on the internet without considering whether or not their work is pleasing to the Lord.
Bringing awareness to injustice is an honorable motive, and in some cases, that may be the best course of action. However, we must always ask ourselves whether sharing personal experiences is the best vehicle for this.
There’s something countercultural about resisting the urge to write about something immediately, to turn a deeply felt experience of anger, grief, or wonder into a hot take or a piece of content. Not every powerful thing is meant to be published—or even written—right away, or even at all.
Some things are too holy to do anything with but sit with them and let the Holy Spirit work in us as we process and reflect on them.
I have experiences I would like to write about someday. In doing so, I could help others who have been through similar situations or at least encourage them. This is a fine motive, too, but as the illustration goes, you can’t put someone else’s mask on during an emergency on an airplane unless you put yours on first.
I’m not qualified to encourage anyone on these topics unless I’ve processed my experiences first—and honestly, that may never happen to the degree that I feel confident in my ability to write about them.
Guard your deepest-held personal experiences. Let them work in your life until they’ve done what the Lord intends. Sometimes, that process takes years, and it never feels complete.
But if we rush to write before we’re ready—before our hearts have been reshaped by grace—we risk missing the deeper transformation those moments were meant to bring.
Writing, at its best, doesn’t just tell a story. It testifies. And testimony, to be true, must be rooted not in immediacy but in maturity.
Is this something you can relate to? Do you have further reflections about when it’s appropriate to write about powerful experiences? Please share them in the comments.
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