The Same 3 A.M. I want to talk to y’all about 3 a.m. Because I know some of you are up at 3 a.m. Right? Your mind is running the lesson you haven’t finished, the yes you shouldn’t have given, the text you forgot to answer. You’re lying there in the dark doing math on your whole life. My friend LaVonne Grace is up at 3 a.m. too. Same hour. Different wake-up. When the Lord wakes her, she writes. Her grandmother taught her that when she was a little girl. Keep a glass of water on your nightstand, and keep a pen and paper near you. LaVonne told us on the live that sometimes she’ll wake up in the morning, find a whole notebook full of writing, and go, wait, did I write that? And a lot of times what’s on that page is the answer. The answer to the very thing she’d been praying about. Same hour. Different wake-up. I’ve known LaVonne Grace for years, y’all. She’s been an educator for decades. She’s a scribe, and I don’t use that word loosely. Her work is called Write Within Her, and she describes it as healing on paper. So I got her on a live, and I asked her all the questions I’ve been wanting to ask, and I’m going to walk you through what she said, because I think some of you need it more than you know. Here’s where I want to start. Most of the women I walk with don’t write anymore. Not because they don’t love it. Some of y’all were the girl with the notebook. The girl with the favorite pen. Okay, don’t touch our pens. I’m serious. Don’t touch our pens. But somewhere between the ministry and the business and the house, the pen started belonging to everybody else. You write the lesson. You write the announcement. You write the text to the woman whose husband just left. You write the proposal, the caption, the prayer for somebody else’s crisis. When’s the last time you wrote something nobody was ever going to read? LaVonne Grace told a story that stopped me. She said in high school she was so quiet in class. Never said much. And her teacher would read her papers and say the writing didn’t match the person sitting in her room. The girl on the page and the girl in the chair were two different girls. I sat with that one, y’all. Because some of you are living that right now, just flipped around. The woman everybody sees doesn’t match what’s going on inside you. You’ve gotten real good at being the one in the chair. And there’s no page anywhere for the other one. So I asked LaVonne why women don’t journal. She’s actually studied this. And the first thing she said was the word. Journaling. The word alone scares people. Because we’ve made it this thing with a format. You have to be in your favorite chair, with your candle, with your worship music, with the right atmosphere. And if you can’t set all that up, well, I guess you’re not a journaler. We laughed about it, but it’s true, right? It became one more assignment. And some of you do not need one more assignment. LaVonne Grace shared that when she was little, she’d get those punishment sentences. I will stay in my seat. I will not talk. A hundred times. The teacher thought that was punishment. LaVonne was over there having the time of her life. But I’m thinking about the rest of us. The ruler. The “do it again, that’s not neat enough.” Some of us learned really young that writing was something you get graded on. And a woman who’s already being graded everywhere she goes? She’s not going to pick up one more thing she can fail at. Now listen to how LaVonne Grace talks about it instead. She said healing on paper is like scratch paper in math. You know how you’d work the problem out on the side before you had the answer? That’s it. You’re not writing the finished thing. You’re working it out. And that matters in your body. When you try to hold everything in your head, it’s like doing long division in your head at 3 a.m. Your brain keeps the whole problem running because it’s scared it’ll forget a piece. That’s the replay, y’all. That’s why you can’t sleep. Your brain is trying to be your filing cabinet. LaVonne Grace calls her journal her second memory. Her backup. Once it’s on paper, your brain can finally put it down. This isn’t just a nice idea, by the way. Dr. James Pennebaker has been researching this since the 1980s. In his early studies, people who wrote about hard experiences for just a few short sessions ended up making fewer trips to the doctor. His book with Joshua Smyth, Opening Up by Writing It Down, lays out decades of that work if you want to go there. And God said it before the researchers did. “Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables” (Habakkuk 2:2). Plain. Not pretty. Plain. He told Jeremiah, “Write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book” (Jeremiah 30:2). He’s been asking us to write the whole time. Not so we could perform it. So we’d remember what He said. So I asked LaVonne Grace the question I really wanted to ask. If a woman starts tonight, one page, one honest sentence, what should she write? And she said, one word. Y’all. I started laughing, because I knew she was going to say that. I’ve never met anybody who can take one word and turn it into a devotional, a product, a whole teaching, pages and pages, and never once repeat herself. She’s just like that with one word. She said take the word peace. Now imagine peace is a real person. Interview it. If peace followed you everywhere you went this week, what would it look like? What would it sound like? Where would you notice it? And, this was my favorite part, what isn’t peace? So peace knows the difference too. Write the word at the top of a piece of paper. Leave it on your kitchen table. When a thought comes, walk over and add a line. That’s it. And she said by the end of the week you’ll look down and realize you filled the whole page. End of the week. I made her say it twice on the live, because I need you to hear it. Not the end of the session. The end of the week. You do not have to sit down for twenty minutes. You don’t have to feel it. You add a sentence on Monday and walk away. That’s allowed. The second thing LaVonne Grace does, she does with her students. Her kids are learning English as a second language. So she takes pictures on her walk to work. A pile of trash. A broken door. A plant nobody watered. And she calls the activity Everything Has a Story. If this plant could talk, what would it say? And one of her kids wrote, as the plant, that Miss Weaver used to stop by and see me, and now she doesn’t see me anymore. She forgot to water me. I’m going to be gentle with this, but I want you to try it in your own house. Walk around and ask what things would say. The stack of mail. The workout shoes by the door. The Bible on your nightstand. Wait, let me say that softer. I’m not trying to guilt you with your Bible, okay? That’s not what this is. I’m saying things around you are holding stories you haven’t let yourself hear. And sometimes it’s easier to let the plant say it than to say it yourself. There are no wrong answers. LaVonne Grace says every single one of her kids’ answers is correct, because that’s how they see it. Yours too. The third thing is the one that’s closest to my heart. LaVonne writes letters to God. And then she writes down what He speaks back. I’ll tell you something. When I first started blogging, I didn’t put my name on it. Nobody knew it was me. It was just letters to God. My whole heart on paper, and I didn’t have to figure out who’d be offended or who might trace it back to the person who hurt me. I still keep a journal I write to Him. And I sign it however I’m feeling that day. Some days that’s Tanya Tenica. Some days it’s Tired. Some days it’s Your Daughter, Who Is Trying. That’s not a sermon. That’s not preparation. That’s just talking to your Father. Some of y’all have been praying for years and somewhere along the way prayer turned into getting ready for something. Ready for the lesson. Ready for the meeting. Ready for the woman who’s going to call you crying. A letter doesn’t have to be ready for anything. And listen, use whatever works. One of our brothers on the live, Tim, does house-to-house ministry, and he records voice memos and lets the app write it out. Me? I still have to write it by hand, and then I take pictures of the pages, put a date and a title on them, and drop them in a project file so I can find them later. Before that I used little tabs on the side of my notebook. LaVonne’s a tab girl too. Whatever gets it out of your head and somewhere you can come back to it. That’s the whole point. So here’s what I’m asking you to sit with this week. Not do. Sit with. What word would you want following you around? Write it at the top of a page. Put it on the table. Let it fill up slow. And go find LaVonne Grace. She’s on Substack, and you can reach her at lavonnegrace.com. She said on the live that she can only give you suggestions, you get to make it whatever you want. I love that about her. Tell her Tanya Tenica sent you. I love y’all. Grab a pen. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tanyatenica.substack.com/subscribe
