Happy Lutheran

To blog, or not to blog, that is the question.  At least, it has been for me these past few months.

I started my blog back in 2012, and for many years, I wrote every week. Then maybe a year or so ago, it started to be a little less often–maybe every other week, and then every third week. Until finally, sometime in May, I decided I want wanted to take a step back, and reflect on whether or not this was a way that I wanted to continue to spend my time. I mean, blogging doesn’t take lots of time, but I am busy, and I wondered if that time might be better spent doing something else.

Obviously, the world doesn’t need one more blog, and it certainly doesn’t need mine. I’ve never had a huge readership, and, frankly, that’s not why I do it anyway—It never has been.  So, why keep going?

In this time that I’ve spent reflecting, and trying to give voice to why I have kept this blog up for so long, and why I couldn’t just easily drop it, I realized that it’s important to me because of who I am, or at least, who I would like to be.  First, I am a person who is deeply loved by God and who loves God deeply in return. And therefore, I am someone who deeply loves the world that God has made, and all the myriad, surprising, and joyful ways we are connected. And I want to bear witness to that— to celebrate that; and also to cry out when those relationships are violated, and bear witness to the sometime terrible aspects of our inter-relatedness as well.  And second, I am a theologian, and one of my core convictions is that being a Christian matters for all aspects of who we are in the world, and therefore we are called to engage the whole of this messy, broken, miraculous world with the eyes, heart, and hands of faith.

We are all called to do this in lots of different ways of course, but for me, the word is the best tool that I have. I’m not creative in any other way, really, but I can write.  So, I realized, that for me, a blog is a way to keep me positively engaged and bearing public witness to the things that matter to me, things I want to notice, and things I want others to care about, too.

So, in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger–you know it’s coming–I’m back.

Thank you for reading this post, and I hope you stick around for what comes.