How One Blogger Found Encouragement in Difficult Times

Our new bloggers series continues with Melissa, who started Living in the Wait.

Her blog serves as a resource for those waiting for something in their lives, whether it’s a job, spouse, home or something else.

How one blogger turned a painful situation into a life-changing blog Melissa discovered you can still live life during that time of waiting for something your heart desperately desires.

In Melissa’s case, she and her husband were waiting for a family due to infertility. It’s a painful topic to talk about, but Melissa felt like it was her calling to share her story.

Blogging about her journey and wait has brought joy to her life. She wants to continue encouraging people going through difficult times.

First-year blogging highlights:

Started The Wait List featuring guest posts to connect with others who were also waiting
Selected as recipient of ProBlogger scholarship to further the blog’s reach
Generated cycle of encouragement: live life to the fullest, and give back to others

Melissa’s blogging tips:

Progress over perfection
Celebrate your wins

Don’t forget to sign up for our free Start a Blog course and join us for the International Start a Blog Day on February 7.

Links and Resources for How One Blog Turned a Painful Situation into a Life-Changing Blog:

Further Listening

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Darren: Welcome to episode 273 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name’s Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a site and a podcast to help you to start an ,amazing blog that’s going to change the lives of your readers in some way, and hopefully will change your life, too both in what it gives you personally but also hopefully some income as well. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger and find our courses at problogger.com.

Speaking of courses, today we do continue our Start A Blog story series where we’re featuring stories from bloggers in their first year of blogging. There are all these bloggers who’ve been throughout Start A Blog course and many of them participated in our International Start A Blog Day last February. We’ve got the second iteration of that event coming up on the 7th of February this year.

We’re running these stories to try and inspire as many people as possible to start a blog and be a part of that process. You can join in the fun of International Start A Blog Day and get a free course to help you set up a blog in that time over at problogger.com/startablog.

Today’s story is from Melissa. She has a blog called Living In The Wait. I love the topic of this blog and that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to share her story today. I’m going to link to her blog which is livinginthewait.com on our show notes today. There’s also a full transcript of the show today and some further listening if you do want to be into one of the big themes that she talks about. You can find the show notes today at problogger.com/podcast/273. I’m going to let Melissa talk now and I’ll come back at the end to just pull out a few of the themes that I love in what she shares.

Melissa: My name is Melissa. I started the blog called Living In the Wait and the URL is livinginthewait.com. What my blog is about is it’s a resource for those who are basically trying to live in the wait. Whether you’re waiting for a family, job, spouse, we all wait for something in our lives. For my husband and I, that wait happened to be infertility.

Why I started my blog was based upon our own personal experience. For over three years, my husband and I have been going through infertility. Something that I never imagined or of course, who would want something like that to go through? But while we were in that process, I began asking myself this question. I said, “How am I supposed to keep living in the wait? How do I keep living every month when I’m continually disappointed? How do I keep living my life? How do I live in the wait?”

That’s really where the whole concept and idea behind Living In The Wait began, where I wanted to be a source for others who are going through a wait and providing them encouragement, support, a community, resources, so they knew that while you are waiting for something in your life that your heart just desperately desires, that you can still live during that time. That’s what I had to learn and that’s also what I wanted to share with others, as well to be a resource for them.

I started my blog. My first post was February 4th of 2018 and as I mentioned, really the whole goal with that is just to be a resource, support, encouragement for those going through some sort of wait. We all wait for something. Our wait just happened to be infertility. During that time, I really noticed a lack of resources, information, support available for people going through infertility and I wanted to do something about that. I knew that I needed that for our journey and I just was surprised that it wasn’t made available to us readily in my community. I’ve noticed that it’s a topic that is hard to talk about and I think that’s part of the reason people maybe don’t share as much. I knew that it was something that God was leading me to do, was to share my story.

I was just amazed as soon as we started sharing ours, how many people stepped up and shared their story as well. Through that, just felt so much community of other people from around the world experiencing the wait, the sam...