Hello friends!
Thanks for checking out the new version of the Anchor of My Soul blog – The Anchor Blog. I’m Andy Bayer. My late wife, Julia Bayer, started this blog on Blogspot back in 2015 as a way to update people on her cancer journey and to share the hope her faith gave her. Before she passed away in December 2016, she asked me to carry on the blog however I saw fit. So that’s what I’ve done.
Neither of us could have predicted how many interested visitors we would get to the blog. Both of us received countless messages of encouragement, questions from the searching, or stories of hope and redemption from blog visitors.
Vulnerability
Julia’s first blog, Choosing Vulnerability, very much captures the heart of the blog from the beginning. As we found out, life can get extremely hard, and it can happen extremely fast. And we also found out that one of the only things that really helped during these hard times was being open and honest with others about the gauntlet that we were running.
Staying true to Julia’s heart of vulnerability has been difficult for me. During Julia’s illness, I had many questions and struggles with why this was happening. I didn’t talk openly much about these struggles, probably for a few reasons. First, I couldn’t fully process my thoughts because I didn’t have the time or energy. All of my resources were devoted to taking care of Julia along with working full-time and other responsibilities. Because of this, I didn’t feel I could clearly articulate my percolations.
Second, everyone so admired Julia’s strength and trust in God that I felt that I would cause discouragement if I shared my struggles. So many people came up to me and said, “you and Julia are handling everything with such strength and faith”. I would mostly just smile and say, “it’s because of your prayers”. Little did they know that my faith wasn’t that strong and that I had no idea what effect any of the prayers were having. In fact, there was only one type of prayer I was concerned with – prayers for Julia’s healing. And those didn’t seem to be going too well.
I did talk to Julia a bit about my internal battles. However, I didn’t share all of my deepest, darkest thoughts with her because she had enough of a mental burden without taking on my full load.
Then Julia passed away, and I had nothing but time – time with my thunderstorm of thoughts raging in the night. The only way to deal with my thoughts was to write. I have always been much better at writing my thoughts than speaking them. It was a release valve.
Then I figured that if I was writing so much, I might as well put some of it on the blog. So that’s what I did with some of it. I still hesitate to be 100% vulnerable on the blog. But I am getting better at it.
Blogging in Faith
And something ironic happened: as I wrote about my faith struggles, my faith increased. I felt God saying, “it’s ok, you can bring me your doubts, your anger, your pain.” I am, by no means, done working through everything with God, and probably never will be. But I feel God’s presence in the wrestling, even when I don’t get answers.
The blog continued to help many people going through similarly painful events. So I decided to expand and improve it. And this is the result!
Feel free to contact me with any feedback, or if you just want to chat! Don’t be shy – I love connecting with blog readers!