Again, I must apologize for the drought of posts here…

Of course, this is provided I have any sort of regular readership. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter as much. Though you could say, in that case, that I am apologizing to myself. =)

I do have somewhat of an excuse, as in the last weeks I’ve finished up the last hectic two weeks of my church internship job, moved back to the city where I go to college, and begun a painting job that averages about 10 hours a day.

Regardless of excuses, however, I do realize that posting consistently is a key part of having a solid blog, even though the expected and unexpected immediacies of daily life often get in the way of that ideal (here’s a novel idea: I could write shorter posts. Not every post, after all, has to be some sort of masterpiece).

This thing is definitely still in its germinating stage. In other words, I’m still trying to figure out what kind of “publication” I want my blog to be.

Record of personal life?

A compendium of philosophical musings?

A commentary on the larger goings-on of the world?

Or pet project with a limited life span?

I don’t know yet, really. Hopefully some combination of the first three, and that ideally with more artful weaving than disjointed jumbling.

We’ll have to see

For now though, we’ll end not with that ambiguous sentence but with a disturbing fact: I said earlier that “I don’t really care if nobody reads this.” Turns out that I must care more than I thought I would, because I’ve been checking to see how many hits I have far more often than I’ve actually been writing anything on here. How’s that for a manifestation of the human narcissistic tendency?

The danger of this blog becoming an idol is very real.

And I know that I won’t be able to escape that completely, but I pray that God in some way can overcome it, and that by his grace I can move beyond a mere pretense of the qualities I would like to have: wisdom, integrity, authenticity… These are qualities that, as soon as I think I have them, I suspect disappear quite quickly at that very moment when I begin to be proud of having them, and so cannot therefore stand alone. They cannot be my qualities, inherent to me and able to rest on my own power; they can only be qualities that I share with God, or more accurately God shares with me, I guess.

(But here I go again: I’m beginning to be proud of what I’m saying here right now. Sometimes it seems an endless cycle.)

This, then, is the key question I’ve had for a while: How can God give me any virtue without my becoming proud of having that virtue, of thinking that for this reason I am better than other people? Is his ability to give limited by our pride, by our ability to misuse/misinterpret the gifts he would like to give us? Is God willing to take the risk anyway? And if so, how much of a risk is he willing to take? How much is God willing to lose in order to give to us?

Aah, I’m rambling now, and its three in the morning!

Time to sleep. Good night and God bless, my friends.