So I have been posting to this blog for a couple of months now, and I thought it might be a good idea to explain why I am doing this or at least what exactly it is that I’m trying to accomplish. I suppose this would have made for a good first post, but I didn’t think about writing about this until now. I wanted to try to explain why I write the things that I write and why I have chosen to post it to a blog.
I have enjoyed writing for a long time. I started writing for recreation early in high school and it has continued to be something that I enjoy doing. There is something about sitting down and pouring out my thoughts on paper that is very therapeutic. I tend to spend a lot of time in my own head and, I’m sure my wife would agree, that I’m not great at talking about the things that are on my mind, though I am a little better now. However, writing allows me to take those thoughts out of my head and begin to make sense of them. I can work through them and perhaps even discover something from them. I have noticed that often I will sit down with an idea of what it is I want to say with a relative plan for how I will say it. Typically, by the time I am done, I find that the direction has shifted and I ended up saying something completely different.
I actually had never even considered starting a blog until some friends and family mentioned that they thought I should. I’ve never really shared the stuff I write outside of trusted friends and family. I was afraid that people wouldn’t like it or maybe they would confirm the voice in my head, telling me that it wasn’t very good. So, I strategically only showed my writings to the people I thought would always be supportive. I say all of that to show you when it was first suggested that I start a blog my initial reaction was to laugh and say that will never happen. However, over the next few weeks I found myself writing more than I had in a long time, and with a lot of thought and prayer I, reluctantly, started to research blogging and clearly took the leap.
I write the things I write as a part of my personal journey. I have been a Christian for a long time but it has only been in recent years that I have really allowed Jesus to transform me into a true Christ follower. As I learn to submit to God and give my life to him a little more each day, I find myself seeing scripture in a new way. I start to find and realize things that maybe I didn’t see before, or sometimes they just make sense to me in a way they didn’t before. As I said before, I tend to write to get the thoughts that are in my head on paper where I can make sense of them. It is the same thing here. I write so I can work through it, understand it, and learn to accept it. I don’t consider myself to be a preacher, instructor, and I certainly don’t think that I know everything. But I do think that we can all learn from each other and draw strength from each other. So, if something that I write is able to help somebody else then I am happy to put it out there and allow God to use me in that way.
Since I started this blog, I have struggled with it and I have gone back and forth trying to decide if it was something that I would continue to do or not. I am still constantly nervous that people won’t like what I write or that somebody will take it the wrong way and feel like I am preaching at them. I have struggled with the amount of views that my blog has received and felt like it wasn’t worth doing. Recently, I have started to look at it a little differently. Not to say that I don’t still struggle with wanting views and wanting recognition, but I have started to see an upside to blogging that has nothing to do with any of that. If you read “Open Letter to my Twin Sons,” then you read how we all leave a legacy behind. I have started to think about the legacy I will leave behind. Looking at my past, I haven’t had the best start. As I mentioned in “The Problem with Silence,” I spent a long time not willing to speak up about my faith, rarely attended church, never read the Bible and in general lived my life my way not God’s. I don’t want that to be my legacy. I don’t want a legacy of silence and timidity. I want to leave a lasting legacy. I want to leave a legacy behind that will make my sons proud. I want to leave a legacy behind that my sons can look at and learn from. I am starting to see my blog as a good start to that. They will see me going beyond just telling them about Christ and be able to see how I spoke about Christ to anyone that was willing to listen (or in this case read). They will be able to see my journey: both the struggles and the victories. Hopefully, they will be able to learn from it as well. Maybe they can learn some of the lessons it has taken me over 30 years to learn at a much younger age.
I can’t lie I still hope that I will write something that will go viral. I still have a dream that at some point I can turn writing into a career, but in the end, I write this blog because God keeps giving me things to write. I write this blog because I want my children to see how God worked in my life. I write this blog because I have to break the silence that has plagued my life for so long. I write this blog to shine my light to the world and hopefully help somebody do the same.
