During most of my pregnancy and the whole first year of my son's life, I spent many hours thinking up topics and ideas for a blog I might create in the future. I had and still do have a strong desire to encourage women of all kinds; young, old, naive, mature, serious, silly, wealthy, poor....and whatever else in between. I was overcome with much anxiety and lack of confidence during that time span of a year and half. So my dream to reach women with the love of God and a love for His Truth through a blog format didn't really become realized until 2011. However, my desire to minister to women started many years before and became very strong in my heart during the year 2009 and continued to grow until I began writing in August of 2011.
Many nights during my son's first year I would think about--pray about how I wanted to encourage the world around me using the gifts and talents God has given me; thinking what I would say/tell my reading audience and what topics to address. At the time of all this thinking and praying, I had no exact direction on how to pursue this longing in my heart to be an encouragement to a larger audience of women than friends at work, friends at my church, family and students in our ministry. But somewhere in the time span of 2009 to 2011, I got the idea to share my thoughts with the world through writing a blog.
When my son was born and for those next eight months, I was awake every three hours....every night. (please don't judge me (haha!).....you don't know what my circumstances were....that's a WHOLE other story. haha!). So during those times in the night, when things were very boring and I was feeding our son, or just having a bad case of sleeplessness, I thought of the idea of beginning a blog. I spent many nights praying the Lord for direction; asking Him to help overcome my fears about starting this blog. I had created the basic idea of my blog in my mind. Sketched it all out in my mind, but never did anything (according to my memory) about setting up a blog account, writing my topics and stories down on paper or even telling anyone about it.....well, okay, I told one person--my husband.
After much thought and many months of postponement of my vision for this blog, the last week of July 2011 came and I felt like I should just attempt to look into blog-creating websites.....and just get an idea what I was about to "get into". So, one late night in late July 2011, I sat down on the couch, with my computer in my lap and went to the blog website I already knew a bunch about (blogspot.com) because my family's ministry blog site was created on blogspot.com.
Deciding to start "goofing" around on the website, I clicked a button for creating a blog. Then the site asked me to register for an account and submit a username and password for all future access to my brand-new account. So I sat there and thought about what username I would like to make for this new women's ministry blog account. And then I thought about what password I would submit. All that time, I knew I had not done anything with the ideas in my head about a women's blog, so my choice of username and password were new and fresh. I, to ALL of my knowledge, did not have a personal account on blogspot.com. So, I was thinking that I was creating an account for the first time.
Well, when I clicked the submit button on the registration screen up came a 'live' blog.....already set up. It had the format that you see right now. It already had the title "Get Real, Woman!" and a little paragraph of what the blog site was to be centered on. I sat in shock.....looking at the screen. What I had been praying and dreaming about for about a year and a half was already set up and ready to contain it's first blog post!! I couldn't figure out how it all happened. I still can't figure it out. The paragraph describing the theme or reason for the blog was my heart's words exactly that had been swirling around in me for many months. The only person who knew was my husband, so I basically thought he had done it for me and forgot to mention it to me.
That night, I worked on the already created and 'live' blog. Yes, it was 'live', meaning it even had it's own web address set up, so that anyone could have typed in a browser the address and pulled up this very blog site which had no posts written yet before I even knew it existed. So, I never got to choose the name of the website address. It was already there: womengetreal.blogspot.com!! I was stunned. I thought my husband had done it all and somehow got every word correct that flowed from my soul about my vision for this blog.
Naturally, the next day I thanked my husband. I woke up and was eating my breakfast on the couch in the living room and my husband was in the kitchen. As I walked through the kitchen to put my dish and spoon in the sink, I casually mentioned to him that I was up really late the night before working on my future blog. I immediately added with a big smile and gentle 'thank you' to him for creating the blog for me to use as a ministry tool. Before he could speak, I also said how blessed I was that his description paragraph for what my blog was to be about was SO spot on what my heart was telling me to focus on.
My husband casually looked up from his cereal bowl and said that he did not do any such thing. He said he had never even attempted to create a blog web address for me, or to create a title for the blog and an introduction paragraph. Obviously, I was SHOCKED! I asked him if he was serious. He said he most definitely was. So, to this day, I don't know if any human being actually created this blog. They would have to have chosen the EXACT username and password combination that I chose when I was "registering". I believe God made the blog site; that He set it up for me. After many months of great anxiety struggles, self esteem issues, sleepless nights I believe God was telling me He believed in me and my purpose behind the blog. And since then, God has helped me in so many ways to share my stories. He is the mastermind behind it all. So, Happy 1st Anniversary to the blog that God built.
P.S.--This is the list of all the countries in which someone has read my blog in this past year.
USA, Russia, Germany, United Kingdom, Sweden, Latvia, Brazil, Spain, India, Uganda.
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