March 27, 2024

In this post as well as my last I feel like I’m kind of outing myself as the kind of person no Christian is ever supposed to admit they actually are.  I’m feeling exposed. These feelings are a part of what this was always going to bring for me though.  So I’m trying to stay true to the process.  Be honest.  Write openly.

I sometimes go back and read what I’ve written and I try and image how I look to myself if I pretend I wasn’t the author.  I don’t really like some of my last post and that was only written yesterday.  I don’t dislike it because I wasn’t being honest, but because I think you could read it and think I was trying to say something without just saying it.  So I think I should point out here that I’m not trying to say anything in riddle form.  At least, not on purpose.  Of course there is the subconscious mind.  If I sound like I’m venting in some of these posts, its because I’m venting.  So my words may not be perfectly chosen and I might be forgetting something in my exploration of a topic that I actually agree with, but just didn’t represent all that well.  So these faith posts are better off taken as a whole.  They are most acurately understood by actually knowing me too.  That part is hard for those of you who are reading along, but haven’t had much time to get to know me in person.  It’s the nature of this media I suppose.  But I will say, even if it kind of goes without saying, that taking any one post as a complete roll up of who I am and what I think, is probably not a safe bet.

Feeling like your coming in part way through the conversation?  There are earlier posts that share the “faith” tag with this post. Read them if you want to catch up.Click here to read the other posts with the “faith” tag.

In fact, I have to decide to be intentionally incomplete in order to blog at all or else I’d be typing 5000 words in each post and that’s not really helpful for me.  I need to compartmentalize and then try and write in that compartment.  So many topics overlap though, so I skim over some huge thoughts for no other reason than to be able to actually do this thing.  I might not even be getting the compartments right, so that’s kind of a frustration for me too.  It’s like inside my self I have a vast file room sorted in various ways.  Over the past 25 years, many of these file cabinets relate and so to talk about any one thing is hard because in reality that cabinet is a part of a system of cabinets.  Some of these cabinets go deep.

I need to accept that there simply isn’t any perfect way to do this blog thing.  If you know me, this kind of acceptance is a challenge for me.

An example of what I don’t like is how in the last post I spoke about being like other Christians and then I talked about bible reading and missed stuff about prayer and also didn’t really take time to say what I actually think about what the Bible and prayer actually are.  I also didn’t really say how much I respect those who seem to be able to so easily love the scriptures.  Missing details, especially details of the kind that might end up hurting someone I respect, makes me feel panicky.  I want to sort of put a period on the sentence and not leave things hanging.  It’s hard to resist trying to explain every little thing, but an explanation in this example doesn’t change the fact that I’m not reading the bible as a discipline these days and that was the point.

So I decided that this is what I can do.  I can write the feeling of panic into a post.  It can sit here with the other posts being a sort of bookend.  Holding it all up so the other volumes don’t fall over before I’m finished.

I’m finished…for today.  🙂