After endless procrastination, excuse-making and other nonsensical avoidance tactics, the blog is launched.
My reasons for not getting it off the ground sooner included:
1) Not having a particular theme or single purpose (which all the blog-starting advice blogs say you should have - Adrian would say I read too much)
2) Missing all the obvious "starting" points: the birth of various babies, the beginning of life in a new country, the move to a new house, the launch of our homeschooling adventure (and likewise the transition into unschooling), the start of a whole new way of being church. At all of these starting points, when other, much more spectacularly organised people seem to launch their blogs, I am instead to be found treading water furiously while at the same time desperately trying to hold on to my dignity - and the very idea of even writing anything is absolutely, completely laughable. Completely.
3) Not having a camera. I wanted to add photos to my blog, but Adi was always taking the camera to the zoo. That served as quite a good excuse for a long time, until he bought me one for my birthday. In May. And now it's August.
4) Not having an audience. What's the point in writing if no-one's going to read it?
5) Having an audience. What if I write something in all innocence and it causes some kind of minor tsunami?
Yesterday at church we were discussing the importance of telling stories. Not other people's stories. Not made-up stories. Our own stories. Our own stories, as they are happening, in real time, during the messy confusing stages, and hopefully right through to the neat conclusions where all the loose ends get wrapped up (Yeah, right!)
There's something deep in the essence of what makes us human that needs narrative in order to make sense of things. We crave context, we seek commonalities, we want to relate events to other events and put faces and personalities and lives into the mix. We do not live completely in the present - where (and what) we are is because of where (and what) we have been and affects where we are going and who we are becoming. These aspects of story (character, plot, setting) are what transform all the single events in our lives into our stories. Events become woven together, stories become woven together and as we tell these stories we create the shared meanings that knit us together into true community. And those of us who love God see his great hand in the ever-enlarging picture.
And there, just like that I have a reason. I crave a place to tell my stories and those of my family (and some of those other stories that are being woven into our story). And that's what this blog is going to be. Doesn't matter if no-one else reads it. I'm just putting it out there for posterity, for us to go back to in many years' time and with all that hindsight to be able to see how our story has unfolded and continues to unfold.
The journey begins...
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| All right then...Let's get this thing on the road. |
