For the two or three of you who've been following my blog, :) you know it's been two weeks since I've posted. This is absolute anathema in the blog world, because the less a blog is updated, the less readers will check for new posts. There is an element of reward for clicking on a blog and finding a new post. Without the reward, there is less reason to keep coming back.
But this hiatus has been (at least partly) intentional. It is necessary to do spiritual inventory every once in awhile. If you're part of the congregation where I teach, you've heard that from the pulpit (okay; we don't actually have a pulpit, but you get my drift). Part of my recent spiritual inventory has focused on my blog. As I shared before, the reasons I blog are four-fold:
1) To enhance the teaching experience - I can preview a topic during the week and see how it unfolds by Sunday. Also, when I have those I should have said moments on Sunday, I can address them in my blog later in the week.
2) To improve church communication - Internet communication including emails, blogs, Instant Messaging, websites, virtual church (you probably wouldn't even believe some of the frontiers being charted in the virtual world), Facebook, MySpace, and multiple others my sheltered self has never even heard of, are here to stay (at least until something even more unsettling pushes them aside). Some applications are better communication tools than others (depending on the desired outcome), but none of them are bad - different, but not bad.
3) To be more transparent - this can be risky. If readers like what they see, then it works well for me. If they don't, well... In a sense, if people don't like what they see in my posts, it works out even better for me. When someone tells me, I didn't like what I read, for whatever reason, I can step back and objectively (hopefully) examine what they're saying. In those cases I invite God into the conversation. If the criticism is on the mark, I have the opportunity to repent. If the criticism is off the mark, I can let it go. There have been times I've had to acknowledge I've been wrong. I mean, who are we kidding? Doesn't everyone? When one chooses to be transparent, he/she had better be prepared to deal with the feedback.
4) As a spiritual discipline akin to journaling - I started journaling in 2004. I only logged 8 entries each of my first three years of journaling. This year I had about 35 entries before I discovered blogging. Blogging, in many ways, was just a way to enhance my journaling discipline. Of course, as we have already intimated, blogging is different from journaling in that no one but me reads my journals. Sorting out one's thoughts takes on a whole new dimension when others are going to be reading along.
It is because of the transparency of blogging that I have had to regroup in the last couple weeks. As was the case when I was writing a lot of music (another spiritual discipline I need to revive), the more I write, the more I have to say. When I've been quiet for a time, my thoughts are like a cork in a bottle. It may be difficult to get the cork out, but once the cork is popped the wine flows freely (obviously the metaphorical wine - I mean, I am part of the Church of God, after all). Quick! Someone! Put the cork back in!
That sums up the intentional part of my hiatus. For the other part, my family spent last week at our Western PA Church of God Family Camp Meeting at Whitehall Camp and Conference Center in Emlenton, PA (the picture above was shot early Sunday morning while the mist was still hanging in the valleys). It was a great camp meeting, and a great week, but we were running constantly. By the time we made the 25-minute drive back to the hotel every night, I was too tired to blog. In the mornings I was too rushed to blog.
I'll share more about camp meeting tomorrow or the next day.
