The Long Quiet

 

It's been a while since my last blog post. Goodness, that sounded like the strains of a confessional booth.

It has been 15 days, to be exact, the longest layoff since I began blogging on this platform. There were good reasons...

I was preparing 3 retreat teachings and a sermon.

I participated in our staff's StratOps retreat.

I came down with some crud located in my sinuses and lungs that rendered me without energy or coherent thought.

My wife lost her job and we had to do some thinking about the future.

These are all great and grand justifications, certainly, for setting aside the blog and focusing on other aspects of life and ministry. I would like to say they are the primary drivers of why I didn't post a single thing for the past 15 days. However, I need to be honest:

I simply had nothing to say. 

I wrestled with this, after reading other bloggers talk about consistent content equals consistent traffic and after thinking through where and when the things I write would have an impact on people's health and growth and honestly my words and ideas were not well formed or meaningful. Frankly I though they may be dangerous.

So I shut it down. I didn't write anything outside of my teaching and preaching roles. It was good.

I feel that in our communication media saturated society, the pressure to communicate is far higher even than when we had less immediate means of getting our message to the masses. The pressure to write books in a literate culture without internet was incredibly high, as the primary interchange of life-giving world-altering knowledge came on the printed page.

Still, there were only so many books that could be written - printers that could print them - and audiences with the resources to buy them. With those obstacles out of the way, the field is so wide we often forget about the significance of running in the heather.

So, I think Psalm 46:10 becomes incredibly relevant:

"Be still and know that I am God."

Being still, being quiet, resting from the relentless compulsion to be visual and verbal, reminds us of the original word.

The one that spoke brilliant light into being.

The one that moved into our grime-stained world.

The one that said "It is finished" and meant every last syllable.

So I have been quiet, thinking, being healed, being loved by the Beloved. I have come to some insights:

1. I am convicted by the lack of beauty and artistry in my own communication. My posts from now on are going to be as much about the art of writing as they are about the content. Not that I am any great artist of the word, but I'll give it a go to honor my soul's ache at this point.

2. I need to aim for significance rather than productivity. I am going to trim my blogging back to three posts per week, to accommodate the need for more creativity as well as to honor the responsibilities of my life that override an upward-shooting mark in Google Analytics.

Thank you for reading, thank you for your visual energy, and I pray this is a time of renewal and hope for us all.

As yet to be written, but hope springs all the same.

Peace.