Here are some closing thoughts on this topic which I started two weeks ago.
In April 2011, I started writing Momentary Delight. What did I hope to accomplish here? In this space, I wanted to explore the creative process and write about things in my life; the things that I love, the things that provoke my curiosity and the things that trouble me. I also wanted to process some of what I’ve experienced these past several years. The past several years have been full of transition. I have transitioned to parenthood. I have transitioned from a controlling and legalistic church to one that emphasizes the works of the Holy Spirit. I have always wanted to write, but I have never felt that I had anything to write about. Being part of a controlling church, I always thought that my experience needed to be validated. I have since realized that these experiences are valid, insofar, as they are mine. Now, as I try to process the many feelings and emotions of the past several years, and as I try to explore a forward looking faith in Jesus, I felt as if I finally had something to write about. The dam has suddenly and violently burst loose.
It seemed as if I had a thousand things to talk about on this blog, and so I wrote alot. We tend to be people who think that more is better. A common refrain for my youngest daughter is, “I want A LOT.” In retrospect, I wonder if I may have written too much.
I don’t want to feel burdened by this blog. Over the course of my Christian life, I have spent too much time feeling burdened. Feeling like I had to do stuff for God. At some point, I stopped doing stuff for God altogether, and it was more about staying in the good graces of my former church leaders. It’s not a good way to live and it makes our loving heavenly Father into a taskmaster. It’s living the life of the older son in the Prodigal Son story, who thought that being in relationship with his father, was all about being a responsible, dutiful and righteous son. He had forgotten, or had somehow missed his Father’s passionate love for him, a love that was not based on performance, but on his status as a son.
Getting away from that church, I have tried to rediscover the joy of loving and serving God, of loving my family, and trying to be a good father. It’s hard, because if you have ever been in a legalistic church environment, you realize that it’s not long before this stuff gets hard wired into you. Christian life becomes a performance and a very sad one at that. So, I have been trying to break some of those unhelpful life patterns. Blogging has been a part of this process for me. Sometimes, the only time you realize something is really screwed up, is by writing it down. After you read it, then you are forced to deal with it, and to use an appropriate metaphor, you can now turn the page.
This process of blogging out my thoughts and experiences has been helpful for the most part, but there have also been parts of it that weren’t as helpful for me. For a time, I tried to blog almost every night. This wasn’t helpful at all, and made me feel more burdened than blessed. I also felt that my writing almost took on a life of its own. For me, the ideal of blogging is where I am out in the world, experiencing a ton of stuff, and where God is doing a lot of wonderful things in my life, and I am writing about a very small part of those things that happen. More recently, it has felt as if my proportion of life to blogging has been out of proportion. I have realized that I need more life and less blogging.
The second thing about blogging that hasn’t been helpful for me, and something that I have come to hate, is the part of each day when I look at my site hits. I never started this blog to gain readership. I never started this blog to gain a following. I never started this blog to impress people. I started this blog to express things that were on my heart. I started this blog, to process some of my past experiences, so that I could put these same experiences into my rearview mirror. I started this blog to explore my own creative urges and the whole “writing thing”. None of this was about having people actually read what I write here.
Something in this blog that I have enjoyed and that has blessed me are the Mondays with Jesus. I’ve made so many false assumptions of what God desires for me life. I have made so many wrong assumptions about Jesus, about how He sees me, and about what he wants for me. Mondays with Jesus is a time, where I get to turn those assumptions upside down, and where I get to look at the Gospels with fresh eyes. The Jesus I have found there, is a compassionate savior, who desires to bring me healing and into his peace. What I am starting to understand, is that my walk with Jesus needs more Jesus, and a lot less religion.
In closing, I do feel that God wants to redeem my past experiences. I do feel that God can use all of the things that have happened over the course of my life and turn it for His good. I hope that others can be encouraged through my stories and struggles. If this happens, then that’s a “win-win.” As I touched upon in the first two installments of this series, my hope is that this blog can be a place where I can be authentic, real and yet positive and encouraging. It might get messy along the way, but I have come to accept that this is the nature of my life. What is the amazing thing to me is that God can redeem my messiness.
I don’t want to be burdened by blogging. In a small way, I feel that God has inspired me to write, but if I am burdened here, then I could easily turn this blessing into a curse. I will write as often and until I realize that it’s no longer helpful for me. I will hold all of this loosely, and when writing this blog becomes an idol, an obsession, or a burden then I will lay it down. I will bless all you my friends, who have been following me on my journey, and I will walk away to discover what else my God has in store for me.
