Tomorrow is Easter. It feels like it’s been a fast 40 days. I missed my target by a whole 7 days which is disappointing in one way, but in another way, I feel really glad. I just went back to see how long it had taken me to complete the previous 33 posts prior to this Lent period, and it went back to March of 2016. It took me almost exactly a year to complete what I have completed in the past month and a half.
That’s huge for me.
I feel at times that I need to make an effort not to write too much about the blog itself and about my writing process. It feels a bit too inward focussed, but at the same time, I set out to make this blog a record of my search for joy and for fulfillment in this life, and it’s hard to deny that the effort to write this blog and to make it come to life is a big part of that quest for me. If it was the only thing then it would, I assume, turn into one huge feedback loop that would be painful to listen to.
But as I blog my way through my life, the act of writing helps me to understand things. It helps me to organize my thoughts and to see what it is that I’m doing and where I’m going. My hope in this is also that somehow this will be of use to others – that in putting all this out there that other people will be able to read and to be encouraged and helped in their own journeys.
In the midst of all this is a parallel quest to figure out how it is that Jesus figures into all this. For a very long time I have had great difficulty in knowing how to talk about my faith in a way that I feel people who don’t share that faith would be able to understand. I have been uncertain how to talk about God and about Jesus when I am referencing entities who are invisible and spiritual. I think that in many ways I have been wanting to find a concrete way to talk about realities that are not concrete…which I suppose by definition are realities only as far as I believe that they are. I can’t prove them. I can’t provide hard evidence to settle an argument.
I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it. I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of this. I can speak about my experience of the world. I can speak of my thoughts and my feelings. I can speak about the way that I react to things and the way that I strive to relate to people. Then I can talk about the way that my faith interacts with these things. I can speak about the way that I sense the presence of God moving through these things and how I experience that presence through my thoughts and my feelings.
From there people who read my writings are free to make whatever judgments they choose. They are free to reject them or to accept them. They can respond to them however they like, but I’m also hoping that they will measure my words against they evidence they see from my life, as it shows in my writing and from any other sources where they might get wind of me. Am I a person who loves – who shows mercy and grace? Am I growing into a better person? That’s really the bottom line. They can laugh at me or call me a fool or shake their head for my backwards acceptance of spiritual nonsense, but can they find evidence that shows I am a hypocrite or a charlatan? Can they point to my life and say that I am a poor representative of the God I say that I love and believe in?
Almost certainly there are people who can find those things in my past that reflect poorly on me and on my faith, but the aim of all this is that those things would become fewer and farther between, and it’s not just about me really trying hard to become a nicer person because I’ve reached the conclusion that those efforts don’t really take me very far. It’s about reaching for and holding on to the presence of God in my life and allowing it to move me and to transform me from the inside out.
It’s a bit scary to tout myself as evidence of the truth of God because if that’s the way it works then is there any hope of humanity being able to maintain any faith and hope in God? If Christians are the evidence of the presence of God in this world then is there any hope? But I think that’s the thing – certainly there are many examples of bad Christians who lie and manipulate and give Jesus a bad name, but there are also many shining examples of people who have followed in the footsteps of Jesus and it is these people who are the reason that Christianity still carries on to this day in any positive form.
And that’s what I want to be a part of. That’s what I’m striving for. A friend asked me what my blog was about – what am I trying to convey or say from post to post. In one way that was discouraging because it shows that it’s not completely clear what I’m doing here (I’m working on it!) but it was also helpful to remind me to think that through and to continue trying to make it clear until it’s apparent to everyone who comes here.
This is what this blog is for – I am striving to find that place of sweet solid ground, and in so doing I want to share how that sweet solid ground is found smack in the middle of the presence of God. It is found in the midst of the good times and in the midst of the bad times but always in the footsteps of Jesus, and my hope is that as I do this – as I strive for this, it will become clear that there is something true to my words that goes way behind anything that any old snake-oil salesman has to offer.