Hitting Blogger-Puberty (Mid-Life Crisis?) with Piebald Life

So I started Piebald Life almost exactly five years ago. I started it because I had just gotten something published over at BuildingChurchLeaders.com and the kind editor offered to link to my web site.

I didn't have one. So I started Piebald Life.

In the intervening five years, I have spent many words in these posts wrestling with issues that came up in conversations with students as a campus minister with InterVarsity at UNC-Chapel Hill.

My students over the years have forced me to think more fully and wrestle deeply with matters of faith, ethics, politics, and the outworkings of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus than I would have on my own. And for that, I'm deeply grateful.

Being an external processor, these posts have often been half-baked attempts at taking half-baked conversations or responses to students and continuing to refine them.

But as I wrap up year number five here with Piebald Life, I'm hitting blogger puberty--or maybe blogger mid-life. Mostly this is driven by my job shift from campus staff to supervising campus staff.

I'm not having the same types of conversations on a daily basis with students who have too much free time and classes that make them question every aspect of their faith. I'm not hearing those questions that drive me back to the Scriptures to wrestle with the deep questions of meaning and purpose.

I miss that the most, I think, as I'm in month number four of my new job.

And so I'm in a bit of a transition with Piebald Life as well. The stuff that I've desperately needed to process isn't quite as obvious as it once was. Looking back over my posts the past several weeks particularly, I feel like my blogger-voice has cracked many days as I'm trying to find my new voice.

My head is in much less abstract space than it once was. I'm thinking more about practical things: fixing my daughter's hair, working with co-workers, helping to build teams, studying budgets and spreadsheets.

So I'm not sure where that leaves me with Piebald Life. I think part of what's motivating this post is a half-baked apology for some of my half-baked posts over the past couple of weeks and gratitude for folks who are sticking with me.

I think that there's rich ways that life with Jesus intersects fixing my daughter's hair, working with co-workers, helping build teams, and studying budgets and spreadsheets. I'm just still figuring out a) what that is and b) if there's blogger material there or not.

A year ago, I would often have two or three blog posts "on deck" to churn out--either in my head or actually cued up to post. Over the past couple of weeks there's been many days where I'm wondering as I sit down to type what the heck I can talk about.

If I'm just making noise here in my very small corner of blogger-land for no reason other than sheer force of habit, then I'll seriously consider if the world needs more cheap words. I value and respect words too much to want to have them be used cheaply.

On the other hand, part of the value of the blog for me has been the discipline of writing. Posting about five days a week for the past five years has developed me as a better communicator. And I want to continue to see if I can make this transition to finding my new voice as I tackle different types of subjects than I have in the past. That can only come with some floundering as I find some sort of stride.

In the mean time, let me again say thanks for the students who have taught me so much and for the folks who read and the many responses on the blog, on Facebook, or off-line via private emails or conversations. I write to process, but I'm more fully refined by the feedback. Thank you.

And maybe the good news in all of this is that a blogger mid-life crisis means that I avoid my own later down the road.

Doing My Own PR: What I Blog About

"So what do you blog about?" someone asked me recently.

I hesitated, not exactly sure how to answer the question.

"He writes sermon-illustrations," a frequent reader of mine offered. I cringed. Someone gave me a book of sermon illustrations when I came on IV staff. It's terrible, awful, pre-packaged, trite, overly-sentimental, sloppy, thin, and abundantly atrociously grotesquely bad.

All this goes to show what a friend of mine in p.r. once told me: if you don't explain or interpret yourself, others will do it for you. This has pressed me over the past couple of days to think more about how I need to answer the question: what do I blog about?

So here in January at the beginning of the Year of Our Lord 2010, I want to articulate what I blog about.

The time-line of our lives, contexts, culture, relationships, and our internal world all run in one direction. The gospel intersects that line in a nearly infinite number of ways at any given time. I want to pay attention to and live out of the near-infinite number of ways that the gospel intersects my world and our broader world in real-time.

If the Christian story is true, if Jesus really was God-become-flesh and if he really did die for all the brokenness and rebellion in the world and if he really did rise again from the dead three days later, then that changes everything.

To paraphrase a great theologian there isn't any part of the world, our culture, our lives, or our internal world that Jesus does not shout, "MINE!" It's all Jesus' by virtue of his creating it and a second time by virtue of his redeeming it, his "again-making" to quote Julian of Norwich's delightful phrase. And for the most part, we sleep-walk through that reality.

Blogging about the infinite intersection of the gospel in our real-time lives keeps me awake, alert, on tip-toe looking for those realities: in parenting, ministry, Scripture, marriage, coaching kids soccer teams, or following Muslims through airports. The gospel changes everything, in real-time. That's what I blog about.

Or at least, that's what I want to be blogging out. Thanks for those of you who track with me--and even more thanks to those of you who read regularly while occasionally wondering what the heck I'm talking about.

Writing these posts quickens me to the reality of the gospel intersecting my experiences. I hope it might do the same for you.

And if not, maybe I need to hire my own personal professional p.r. guy...or maybe I need to look into writing sermon illustration books.

Blogging like It's 2029

So Prince is a genius. He releases an album on October 27, 1982 he post-dates the title track: 1999. He makes money the first time around and he makes money 17 years later, when 1999 rolls around.

Ditto George Orwell. He writes a book, post-dates it: 1984. Only one mistake there: he was dead by 1984.

Memo to all aspiring song-writers and authors: if you're going to write something, be sure to post-date it. But make sure it's a reasonable bet that you're still alive by then so that you can cash in on the goods.

I think I'm going to start post-dating all my blog posts from here on out.