Five Minute Friday: Bare

Take a deep breath. You have made it. It’s Friday.  TGIF.  I have looked forward to today all week.  I could not wait to see what Lisa-Jo's prompt would be and what I would get to write about.  This weeks word was perfect.  (To tell you the truth....they all are.)  Want to join in?  It is simple:
Got five minutes? Let’s write. Let’s write in shades of real and brave and unscripted.
Let’s just write and not worry if it’s just right or not.

1. Write for 5 minutes flat for pure unedited love of the written word.
2. Link back here and invite others to join in.
3. Go buck wild with encouragement for the five minuter who linked up before you.

Won’t you give me your best five minutes for the prompt:

Bare….

GO:

I came into this world that way....bare.  Nothing but skin between me and the world.  It was scary I think because my first action was to suck in air deeply and cry.  All of my life I have loved the feel of bare skin baking in the sun.  There is something so comforting about the sand, the surf, the heat.  Yet, that is not the only kind of bare I have experienced in my life.  When my brother died suddenly at the age of five, I began to bare my soul on paper.  I needed an outlet and that was the only one I could find.  I kept all my deep eight year old secrets locked deep inside....expecially the one where my brother's death was my fault.  If only I had stayed in our backyard....and not gone to ride with my best friend on our bikes we got for Christmas.  I was thirteen before I bared my soul to my dad and told him what I had done.  He held me as I cried and told me that it was not my fault.  I had not been asked to stay....I was told I could ride the bike....it was an accident....no ones fault.  Vietnam was a big deal and in the news everyday.  I knew people who went there and never came back....I bared my soul on paper writing poems about the war.  I continued to write about life....baring my secrets in my little journal every day.  Somedays it was just a sentence, somedays a poem, somedays just random thoughts.  When I was sixteen, at a youth rally for church, I bared my soul to God for the very first time.  I was raised in the church....I never missed.....I thought I was a Christian....but at sixteen....my world rocked and I knelt at the homemade altar at camp and unloaded it all before God.  Once again in my life I was bare.  This time I breathed in cleansing air and cried tears of great joy.  The writings changed....the person changed....life continued....and it was good.  It would not be the first time....or the last....that I would bare my heart before God.  I have found myself on my knees many times...baring my soul....and when I write....I bare my soul.  Sometimes it scares me because I do not know how the readers will take it.  Other times it empowers me because I am doing it for me.  When I discovered the power of the blog I was at a time in my life when I needed to stand bare and reach out for others who had been there before me.  I found myself with a father, dying of lung cancer and a mother, with alzheimers and they were living with us....newlyweds(we had been married a little over a year).  Blogging was the only outlet to bare my soul to strangers....but people I hoped would be able to help me through this.   Blogging has been a positive outlet for me....and a safe place to once again....bare myself....and be free.

STOP: