If, when I was in college studying for my marketing degree, you had told me that I’d end up spending most of my adult life writing in both my paying job and as a creative outlet…well, I likely would have laughed in your face. However, at the time, I also thought I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Given that there are few people less wired for entrepreneurship than me, you could never accuse me of being super self-aware at that point in my life.
Looking back now, I can see that maybe it’s not such a surprise that I’ve been able to spend my days writing for a living and for pleasure. Ever since 8th grade, and maybe even before, I knew that I enjoyed writing. It was in the 8th grade that I won a district-wide writing contest. My topic: why the rocking chair should be a South Carolina state symbol. Being called into the principal’s office before school to hear the news that I’d won, and then being allowed down the classroom hallway before the other students to deliver the news to my Language Arts teacher is a core memory.
As I entered college and then seminary, I remember vastly preferring writing a paper over taking a test. I hated studying for tests but I found I enjoyed the research and process of writing a paper, particularly in seminary when I was fascinated by the subject material. It was in my college and seminary years that blogging and Christian writing were becoming more prolific. In college and the years following graduation, I started and bailed on no less than three different blogs. I liked the idea of writing regularly, but lacked the discipline and material to maintain it.
But as I neared the end of seminary and began planning a wedding and subsequent move halfway across the country, the idea of writing for fun again began to take root. And now, I had both something to write about and people around me encouraging me to do it. Couple that with an out-of-the-blue opportunity to get paid to edit and write online content, and it seemed to stick. Now, I get paid to do a different kind of writing, but it’s no less meaningful because of the fruit I get to see from the work I do.
But what about writing for pleasure? That brings me back to this blog, to attempt to explain or maybe even justify the silence on this website for the last year. It would seem that I’ve bailed on it, just as I did on the Blogspot (ah those were the days), Wordpress, and Weebly sites I started more than a decade ago (I am pretty sure I can still find them floating out there on the world wide web.)
I guess the primary reason for my silence is simply the same lack of discipline to maintain the habit, though for better reasons than I had in college. In the last year, my job responsibilities have increased. Our kids have become busier with extracurricular activities. I have tried to be more intentional with our kids, particularly our son, as his kindergarten year rapidly approached. Perhaps the thing that added the most additional work to my plate, but joyfully so, my ministry roles at our church have increased as I moved into a teaching role within our women’s ministry and helped develop a missionary care team process for our international missions ministry.
But perhaps the reasons for my absence are less important than evaluating why I have this website in the first place. I’m certain it’s not for the audience. No one has missed it, for I can read the analytics! Certainly I do write for an audience to read, otherwise I would just keep a journal. But that was never really my primary motivation anyway. No, I simply needed to revisit an old blog to remember why I write “publicly” in the first place.
In a post from almost two years ago, I wrote that Christians should write because we desire to steward what God has shown us in His word. That’s it. Stewardship is the simple, yet important, reason I write for pleasure. To be clear, I don’t think I squandered this last year avoiding the blog for the sake of doing nothing (for I did fill the time with other worthwhile things). But as I’ll write soon, the season of my life has turned in such a way that to further neglect writing on this site would feel at best like a waste and at worst like disobedience (though it’s likely more neutral than that).
Writing on this site is an act of stewardship, I believe, though it is not necessarily for the benefit of others. I doubt I have much to say that’s unique from the thousands of other writers who have done this exact same thing, both past and present. If what I write benefits and encourages the random passerby who happens upon this site, then praise God for it.
But at the end of the day, writing as an act of stewardship seems similar to the benefits received from spiritual disciplines, though on a lesser scale. The simple act of obediently using a gift the Lord has given me in service of Him is reason alone to keep writing. The deeper benefit comes from the fact that I am reticent to employ my mind in my spiritual walk with the Lord, too often driven by feelings and emotions. Writing forces me to love the Lord with my mind, to intentionally reflect on what I have learned and what I am learning, in order to glorify Him and hopefully, walk this road of sanctification intentionally and productively as He leads.
And so, here’s to a relaunch of this website, to the hundreds of bots and perhaps tens of real people reading. Let’s get back to it.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
