Blog Interrupted

I’ve learned a few things about myself in creating this blog.

First:  A good idea can be difficult to put into practice

Second:  A blog poses challenges when you’re a private person.

Over lent I participated in 40acts, a campaign out of the UK that challenged people to do Lent generously.  It was a way of engaging creatively with lent by being active with my faith.  I really enjoyed the practice.  Each day a new challenge arrived in my inbox.  It was exciting getting that email with the day’s challenge, especially in the beginning.  Then as the days progressed the lenten assignments became relentless…one after another, after another.  Of course, I added to the difficulty by deciding I would try and blog about the experience.  Then I added even more difficulty when I told my congregation I was blogging….and gave them the web address.  I don’t know what I was thinking.

It wasn’t that the writing part was hard…I am proud to report that I did write something for each day right up until the final week and a half.   It was putting them online that held me up.  In the end,  I just kept my entries to myself.  As a church member pointed out to me, “Michelle, that isn’t a blog, that’s a diary.”

True enough.

We live in a world where everything seems to be so public.  We’re in a Facebook and Tweety (or is that Twitty?) culture that posts everything—what someone ate, drank, thought, breathed, argued, cooked, cleaned, watched, opened, heard, misunderstood. They are predominantly comments for comments’ sake and often deficient in substance.

Egotistically, I didn’t want to add to the noise.  Besides, I preach weekly and there is only so much that people need to be subjected to.  And I’ll admit it, I prefer to keep my thoughts to myself.

Then the other day I was reading the Message and I came across this translation of a familiar passage:

“Here’s another way to put it: You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven.”  (Matthew 5:14-16, the Message by Eugene Peterson)

As if they had been highlighted and penned just for me these words stood out:  Be generous with your lives.   By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God.

I reflected.  Maybe I can learn how to put my thoughts out there, not because my thoughts are fantastic but because God just might be able to use them to do some good…

So here are a few more posts from my 40acts experience.  Yep, just a few.

You didn’t seriously think I’d post them all, did you?

Baby steps, my friend.  Baby steps.