Restart

I like blogging the way that many Americans like soccer. To paraphrase from the Stuff White People Like blog, “Americans like the idea of soccer.” Every four years when the World Cup rolls around, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more dedicated population of fans — for about three weeks. I started up this blog page for a class assignment at Taylor University in the spring semester of 2013, and have let it collect dust ever since. Now that I have graduated, my schedule has a void in the absence of homework, so naturally, blogging seems like a good idea.

Perhaps the largest obstacle for me in actually getting this back up and running is the fact that I don’t have life-altering epiphanies on a daily or even weekly basis (hard to believe, I know). I mean, what’s the point of writing a blog if it is not going to inspire the readers to give all they have to the poor and sail across the Pacific on a raft to live among the people of a tiny island in Indonesia?

I don’t have a concise answer to that question, but I am coming to the conclusion that hitting a home run (or perhaps “scoring a goal,” for my fellow World Cup fans) in the “life-changing message” department of blog-writing is not really the goal. Time is one of the greatest tools for teaching anything, and often learning comes slowly, imperceptibly. A case in point is this: I have just left my college friends and now I am traveling with a group of fellow musicians in the King’s Brass. I want the same depth of relationship with these new friends that I had with my friends from school, but the simple fact of the matter is this: relationships take time. Similarly, anything I have to share that will be deeply thought-provoking or insightful will likely come only after a good deal of time has elapsed since I first started kicking it around in my mind. Often, it is not until I have taken the time to “become good friends” with an idea that it takes a clearly defined shape and is ready to be shared.

So I invite you to journey with me as I take the time to put down my thoughts and experiences. When epiphanies come, feel free to start building the raft for your Pacific journey, but don’t hold your breath for those moments. Instead, take a few minutes to enjoy life and God’s goodness with me through the small things. At the end of however long, we can look back together and find that we indeed have changed, little by little, as we have traveled along. And hopefully it’ll last longer than a three-week World Cup soccer phase!