What Happened to Your Blog?

If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn't cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. .... The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person's story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don't want anything, we are living boring stories, and if we want a Roomba vacuum cleaner, we are living stupid stories. ... If what we choose to do with our lives won't make a story meaningful, it won't make a life meaningful either.


-Donald Miller (from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years) as partially transcribed in my first blog, April 2010.




Thanks for following along with this chapter of my story.
For the past six years, you've kept me sane, or at least something resembling it. You've given me a forum to air whatever silliness has crept into my head and wouldn't leave. You've been a sounding board to pass along whatever it was I thought I had learned along life's journey. You've indulged my creative misfires, my obsessive need to explore the meaning of song lyrics and sitcoms, and even my random thoughts.


Speaking of which, why is it that things are "revitalized," but nothing is ever "vitalized"?


Along the way, you've given me enough encouragement to believe I was making a difference for some of you, adding beauty to your life or at least easing some of its sorrow. There's no greater feeling I've known than to create something that somehow connected with someone else--it's a momentary affirmance that we are all connected in some way and my life isn't in vain.




That kind of feeling was exactly what I was searching for when I started this six years ago.


When I started this adventure I wasn't sure what it was going to look like--I was just a guy tired of working the 9-5, going to the gym and the occasional cookout and not doing anything uniquely meaningful with his life. I wanted my life to tell a better story than that of an Assistant Attorney General who might some day get promoted to a Senior Assistant Attorney General and buy a better sedan and an automatic vacuum. That's when I started sharing life with you.




There's a bigger story I need to tell, though, and I've been working on putting it into book form for the last year. I'm stalled 21,000 words into it, with both the book and the blog taking up just enough mental space that neither can quite get out of my head and onto the page.
I was hoping to keep up at least a minimal blogging presence to keep you engaged until I had something bigger to offer, but trying to do two things at once has meant doing neither very well.
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Kermit the Frog introduced himself to the audience in the "Muppet Movie" in a song. 


In the movie's opening moments, he tells the audience that although it wasn't very logical, he believed he had heard a call toward something more than singing alone in a pond. He was meant to sing, alright, but someone else was supposed to hear it; someone who could somehow relate to the lonely yearning in his soul.


Following his inner calling would involve Kermit leaving his comfort zone and taking some crazy chances to have his own voice heard, but he knew he'd never be quite satisfied if he didn't give it a chance. He wasn't exactly where his journey would take him, but he left his pond in search of his dream, believing there was a rainbow somewhere on the other side. Even if he was wrong, he had to give it a try. As he concluded:


I've heard it too many times to ignore it;
It's something that I'm supposed to be.
Someday we'll find it--the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me.




I'm no singing frog, but I have a story too. It's a story that will make some people laugh as they nod along in agreement, make some rigid people angry as they read in disgust, but hopefully it will provide peace for others.
It's an idea that I wish would have been published somewhere 20 years ago when I needed to hear it, so I'm guessing there's someone else who needs to hear it now.
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When I was growing up as an unpopular but deeply religious kid, my church taught me that God would eventually make my dreams come true according to a strict formula if I just obeyed all the rules they gave me. When that didn't happen, when the proverbial bumps in the road indisputably became dead ends, I was left to believe that God had uniquely withheld those promises from me, because I somehow wasn't worthy of God's love.


It sounds tragic, and in some ways, I guess it was, but some of the hoops I was forced to jump through as a kid are entertainingly ridiculous (I still have the ribbon I won at 6-years-old for being one of the first five kids in my first-grade Sunday School class to recite the 66 books of the Bible in order. Although I cried each time I lost out to the prior four) as are some of the ways I treated God like a Cosmic Vending Machine.


But I eventually found peace with a God who doesn't follow the formulas humans created, and who, I think, both laughs and cries with me looking back at points of my journey. I also learned some pretty cool things along the way.


I can't wait to tell you the story.


It's a story that I think I'm supposed to tell, and I've heard the call too many times to ignore it.
Six years of blogging have led me to this point, and it's something that I'm supposed to be.
So I'm off to find my rainbow, which needs another 39,000 words to completion.





Until then, you won't see me around this space. I'll be back, in some form or another, when I reach the other side.
And I'll have a better story for my trouble.