Don't do it.
So I'm restraining myself.
Living (and blogging) for Eternity
I wouldn’t call myself a "Blogger". Mostly because when I think about the word, I picture a blobby alien in flannel roaming the woods cutting trees down (blob and logger? Get it?). The other reason is because of the weird looks the mere mention of a blog seems to evoke from my Christian pals.
You mean, you publish your private feelings online for everyone to see?
Uh, that would be a no. That’s what my grid-lined Moleskine journals are for. The blog, I can assure you, is nothing more than a desperate cry for attention.
Hold your judgments until the end please—I promise that I’ve got a message that’s worth listening to.
This summer past, I lived in Israel and backpacked through India with a Jewish ministry. It was one of those experiences that you look back on three months later and think to yourself, “Oh my word. Did I actually do that?” We walked where Jesus walked. We shared the gospel with Israelis. We stood on street corners and passed out tracts. We learned Hebrew. We almost got arrested. Then we trekked through India to get into more conversations with Israelis, fresh out of the army, and dying for a mental escape. We got Delhi-Belly. We watched broken, broken people interact with the idea that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. We also got cursed out and spit on, almost run over by rickshaws, and attacked by small beggar children. It was an epic adventure.
I decided that I wanted to start a blog so that my friends and family would have a place to read about our adventures and know how to be praying specifically. Which came in absolute handy because the Lord was faithful to protect us from the flooding that was wiping out Indian villages hours after we had left them. The goal of the blog was to proclaim God’s faithfulness, acknowledge the often-humorous ways that the Lord works, and have a place where I could honestly talk about what my team was experiencing.
I have to confess that my motives were not so pure at the beginning of my blogging career. Remember Xanga? That quirky online watering hole, where anyone could publish anything and have anyone read it? At fourteen I could not think of a better outlet for my hormonal outburst. I made a promise to myself that I would keep the blog for only as long as I was in high school and then after that, I would let it be- an Internet time capsule of sorts.
Recently, I decided I wanted to revisit my blogging roots, poke around the old entries typified by teenage angst and sophomoric yammering. I skimmed a couple of entries and became increasingly alarmed and sad. Post after post I kept thinking, “I felt that way? I thought that way? Who was this person?” I read comments people left- some incredibly hurtful—you know, things that high school girls will only say to the computer screen and not to your face. Others were a little more encouraging. But still the string that seemed to tie all of my entries together was a radical self-love that resulted in self-pity and a desperate cry for help. I needed Jesus really bad.
Graciously, the Lord swooped down and caught up my heart only a few months after my last Xanga entry, yet even after having been walking with the Lord for two years, I still see similar sin and thought patterns in my writing. Flipping through private journal entries and recent blog posts from just two days ago, I can still see echoes of who I used to be, B.C. (Before Christ) as portrayed in my Xanga blogs, but there is a difference- two major differences, I think.
The first is that I no longer write like a fourteen-year-old teenybopper. If this were my blog page, I’d post a picture here [X] of me with gangly arms, a middle part, and braces furiously trying to make my buck teeth submit to their steely frame.
Secondly, I don’t regularly insert words like, “LOL!!!” and “OMG!!!!” Thirdly, I don’t try to use emoticons to emphasize my attitude. And finally, everyone should be rejoicing that I’m not writing “emo” poetry anymore.
I’d be remiss to not mention that fact that despite all of the personal growth, I’ve become a grammatical degenerate more or less, overusing commas to emphasize and add verbal pauses so you’ll know exactly how I’m speaking. But for the most part, I’m now writing like a woman that’s been walking intentionally with the Lord for the past two and a half years.
Which brings me to the second difference.
I can hear it in the tone of my writing how the Lord is changing me. He breaks my heart daily. He renews me. He refreshes me. I do a lot of processing when I write, and through that, can see the work of the Holy Spirit changing my heart, convicting me, and showing me how desperate I am for Him.
There’s a lot of vulnerability in writing. Which is a good thing.
But it’s a scary thing too, because this is where it gets personal. I’ve noticed a trend in some of the close Christian communities I belong to, of a lack of honesty with ourselves, with each other, but most alarmingly, with the Lord. We seem to be falling prey to the deception that we’re not fit for ministry unless we’ve got everything together.
I was talking to my parents on the phone the other night and had made a pretty lengthy list of all of the ways that I was frustrated, challenged, bitter, not growing, resistant to the Lord, and I’d never be a woman of God, and I’ll never get married, and how do I expect to impact someone else’s life when I can’t get mine together, I’ll never be a good mentor if I oversleep for my class—sob, sob, sob.
Sounds dramatic, but I’m fairly emotional, so don’t fret.
My wise dad said, “Who told you that you had to have it all together to be effective in ministry?”
I sniffed and did that shuddery breath that you do after you’ve cried really hard and realized that no one had said that to me. No one had ever looked me in the eye or implied in their tone- “You had better figure your whole life out before you go and help other people.”
I was listening to a fat lie from Satan.
I wasn’t called into ministry because I was perfect. I hadn’t even done anything to earn my own righteousness.
So, I sat down at my journal to process everything. I skimmed through old blog entries, read old comments from friends, and parents of friends, and strangers that had somehow stumbled on my blog and realized something:
The Lord is glorified as He transforms my life and the lives of those who love Him.
It is my hope that in my transparency of sharing the normal everyday awkward moments, spiritual epiphanies, and personal struggles (with discretion, obviously!), the Lord’s faithfulness, goodness, mercy, even His humorous workings, and especially His love, will ring louder and truer than any desperate cry for attention an old Xanga post might clamor for.
Maybe it was a tad dramatic to call my reason for blogging a “desperate cry for attention”. But I desperately want people to pay attention to the fact that our God is alive, He is at work, and He is always good- all the time.
