Why I Blog

I started this particular blog for very specific reasons a couple of years ago. I was maintaining a blog on my MySpace page, but felt a need to move to this blog, which has a decidedly different tone than that one did. Suffice it to say I felt prompted to make some of the moves that I did.

I blog for a lot of the same reasons that everyone else does: to keep far away friends and family (and even some of the closer ones) up to date on what's going on in my family, and to serve as a more in-the-moment family journal, as I write quite a lot for myself, but have been somewhat slack about maintaining a more general family record off-line. But I write for other reasons, too.

I can't tell you how many times since starting this blog I have received comments, emails, phone calls, etc., saying things like, "I felt like you wrote that for me" or "This is exactly what I needed to hear today" or, my personal favorite, "I felt like you were chastising me", always when the person sending the message had never even entered my thoughts when I wrote my post.

I think of myself as a unique person (and, yes, I prefer "unique" to "weird", the favorite of my friends and family members) and I am a distinct, individual soul separate from every other person out there, but the simple fact is that most of my experiences are not all that unique. Most of my struggles and successes are very similar to most everyone else. For all our individual differences, the vast majority of human beings share a great deal in common. So I use my own experiences, what I'm going through at the moment or have gone through in the past, as a jumping off point, as an example to help make what I'm writing about more real and personal, but I try to speak primarily in principles. I have no need to maintain a blog for my own sake. I write to maintain my sanity, but I am perfectly happy (and, in fact, usually much prefer) to do so away from the public eye. My hope is that if I am willing to expose a little bit of myself in order to discuss the principles that affect us all, perhaps those experiences and my (at times feeble) ability to relate those experiences and the insight I gain from them can help someone else going through something similar. I generally weigh what I write very carefully before I post, considering all the people that could possibly read it. And those of you who are long time, consistent readers know that I am the queen of the "disappearing post". Sometimes something is up for only 10 minutes before I decide that maybe it isn't the wisest thing to put out there for the world to see, or maybe on the off chance that Person X might read it and it would be unnecessarily hurtful or uncomfortable for them. What we say and write, the words we choose, the order we put them in and how and where we say them matters. Too often, particularly in the internet age, people are unwilling to take responsibility for the effects of their words. As long as I can remember, I have loved words and been tremendously sensitive, and so I have been very conscious of the effects of my own words in my better moments.

I know that when I do it right and for the right reasons, I can move people. Some of the things I have written here have already ranged far wider and affected more people than I ever would've guessed. The Lord has blessed me with certain talents, and I am finally developing enough humility to recognize that and use those talents in the ways that He directs me to, even if it means living one small piece of my life always outside my comfort zone.