Paying for School

My ongoing adventures in life and the pursuit of more...

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Return

For 2014, I've decided to return to regular blogging.  I've avoided it over the last 16 months (other than during school modules) but I realize now how much I need the discipline in my daily life.

My hesitancy to blog revolves around this little passage in the New Testament that says,
“And remember, our Lord’s patience gives people time to be saved. This is what our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you with the wisdom God gave him— speaking of these things in all of his letters. Some of his comments are hard to understand, and those who are ignorant and unstable have twisted his letters to mean something quite different, just as they do with other parts of Scripture. And this will result in their destruction.” – 2 PE 3:16, 17

I’m not making claims about writing a new epistle, just a recognition how easily the things we say or write, can be twisted and can hurt or lead to unnecessary pain and confusion.  The Elusive has stopped me abruptly in the midst of one of my theological rants, warning me that she’s either going to slip into depression or lose faith if I keep ranting.  Some things are to be pondered and some things are to be shared.  I occasionally have a hard time telling the difference.

But I need to write.  And so I’m returning to regular blogging for 2014.  In part, I’ll be chronicling my work on this pesky Thesis Project that I’m supposed to be about.  Ask not for whom the clock you hear ticking in the background ticks: it ticks for me.  August is my deadline.  And at present I’m the proverbial mosquito loose in the nudist colony: I see the job, I’m just overwhelmed by the work ahead of me.

I need to write because it’s also one of the ways I discover who I am and who I am becoming.  It’s an opportunity to get the inside out in a way quite separate from everything else I do.  Writing, for me, is like a garden where revelation grows.  As my insides are drawn out onto the screen, the blinking cursor seemingly conjuring them from thin air, I come face to face with my good, my bad, my ugly, my beautiful and my most sacred.

And I’ll keep holding this all in the delicate tension that comes from knowing that I am arming those who are bent on despising me, confusing those who want to love me and perhaps even hurting those who care for me.

So, I will return to blogging, whispering my prayers as I write, seeking more to understand than to be understood and continue to share the education life is giving me.

“All along I thought / I was learning how to take / How to bend not how to break / How to live not how to cry / But really / I've been learning how to die / I've been learning how to die” – Jon Foreman