IN WHICH: Joel apologizes and has some catching up to do

As I think I said in my introductory post - I've never been very good at this blogging thing.  Every so often, I get this crazy notion in my head that I should start a blog.  I make a bunch of posts, get distracted after a bit, and then it just sits.  I did the same thing with journals.  I'd get a fancy journal, think "this is going to record the adventure that is my life," and fill the first five-ten pages.  Ten pages of musing, then 90 pages of things that never were written.

This is one thing I did not inherit from my grandmother - for probably something close to 75 years of her life, she kept a daily diary and you could look back and know exactly what she'd had for dinner, what the weather had been like, what had happened during the day, the relationships she had, the people in her life --- her diaries were a detailed record of her life, times, and what was important to her.  Somewhere in our family right now, there are several boxes full of year-long diaries - some which I had even given to her as Christmas gifts.  And each page is filled, top to bottom, with a day of her life.  And I wish that I had that kind of routine, that kind of time to give to just sitting down and writing.  To picking something - just one thing - that I could be so totally dedicated to doing that it becomes the record of my life in some way.

Would I change the fact that there are so many things I appreciate and enjoy doing?  Of course not.  It's part of the reason that I have so much trouble keeping these things up in the first place - there's just so much in life worth discovering, worth aggregating, collecting and experiencing... so much time and so little to see - wait.  Strike that.  Reverse it.

But getting back to the point - I wanted to apologize, as I have come to realize that, in a very humbling epiphany for me, there are actually people who read this blog.  Who apparently find these musings and sermons (well, I think more the sermons than the musings, since I muse so infrequently) worth reading and have now wondered: What happened?

To borrow a term from one of my favorite authors, Stephen King: I appreciate you, Constant Reader (ironically, no pun intended), for calling me back to the writing I enjoy doing so much.  And I apologize for my own inconstancy.  I have a handful of sermons that I plan to sort out over the next few weeks as time permits, and I will be posting them semi-frequently.  I might even have a few musings to put together, should my muse permit.

Till then, thanks for staying around!

-J

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Straw Letter

9-9-18 (Proper 18/Ordinary 23 B, Semi-Continuous) James 2:1-17; Mark 7:24-37 The Straw Letter Last October, we spent a good portion of the month celebrating the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther and the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation.  We explored many of the ideas that fueled Luther’s movement to reform the Catholic church in his time, celebrated our own heritage as Presbyterians, and explored how we as the church are “always reformed, ever reforming according to the word of God.” One of the things that we didn’t explore very much during that Reformation month was the relationship that Martin Luther had with the letter of James.  Of all the books of the Bible, all the letters in the New Testament, all the myriad works that make up the canon of our scriptures… James was the one that Luther disliked most.  Luther didn’t mince words when it came to this epistle - he called it “the epistle of straw,” suggested removing it from study in Wittenberg...
Read more

"Dishonest Wealth"

The texts for this week's sermon are Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13. Dishonest Wealth There’s a dirty word that flies around during the month of April with regularity - of course, I’m talking about taxes.  Every January, we get those wonderful forms that remind us how much we made this year, then we go about the grueling process of figuring out just how much of a cut of that money we need to give to Uncle Sam.  So we call up our accountants, we log onto the tax preparation websites, we pull out the calculators, the big ziplock bag of receipts we’ve saved all year, the letters from the churches and charities telling us what our donations have been this year, everything we can to help figure out what we need to pay, and we crunch those numbers down to the last penny.  We make that extra pot of coffee, pull out the antacids, and we don’t quit until it’s done and we know whether we’re getting something back , or whether we just have to pay...
Read more

IN WHICH: We explore Moral Influence

Image
It's been a busy couple months for my family and I - I had hoped to write some more posts exploring the models of atonement, but between traveling to New York to visit family and then taking time at Covenant Point to participate with our local church camp, things got away from me.  My goal is to make some time in the next several weeks now to continue this exploration more fully! In the first entry we started by exploring what atonement is, and then went in-depth with the most common model that we see in both Catholic and Protestant churches: Satisfaction/Penal Atonement.  We see how the Satisfaction model stacks up, both its pros and its cons, and we see that it is still the most commonly-known and used model of atonement in our culture today.  But if this model isn't... pardon the pun... satisfactory, then what other models have been proposed, and how do they look, instead? As we noted earlier, Anselm kicked much of this debate off because he was unhappy with t...
Read more