Everyone has an opinion about blogging. Thirteen years ago, when I started writing online — we called it web journaling then — people didn’t have as much of an opinion.
But now, everyone is an expert: Write more about struggles, so you can be transparent. Don’t write too much about struggles, so you won’t be depressing. Take more pictures of reality, so you don’t deceive your readers. Don’t take too many pictures of reality, because that’s just not artistic. Write more about the good, because you should be uplifting. Don’t write too much about the good, because that’s not reality.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned after thirteen years of blogging, is that I can’t please everyone. Actually, I can’t please very many people at all. And if I wrote these words in this little space to please people, what a sorry endeavor it would be.
Sometimes I write about beauty, and sometimes I write about brokenness.
Sometimes I write about hope, and sometimes I write about death.
Sometimes, I write about joy.
And sometimes, I write about all of those things — all together, all twisted up and tangled together — because really, isn’t that what life is? A bittersweet mixture of all that is good and all that is evil and all that is Hope and all that is Him and all that has been buried and planted and is yet to blossom, “pressed down, shaken together and running over” [1], awaiting redemption?
I write because I await redemption.
I write because God gave us beauty. Sometimes that beauty is so searingly bright, we can’t even humanly handle the sheer weight of glory. Sometimes that beauty is a promise, seen only through a glass dimly [2], through clouded tears. But always, there is beauty, because always, God is in our midst.
“And that is enough to raise your thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex forever will also drown her pride… Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.” -C.S. Lewis
We want to say the memories split the light in half, the way a single mountain peak does at sunrise, when the orb of burning fire rises just beyond the apex. But the truth is, the light never splits that way. Really, it diffuses, it lights up every crevice and ridge and line until the whole horizon is in flames. As much as we want to fold up the memories and draw lines around them and never travel their pathways again, memories don’t compartmentalize. There is no Continental Divide.
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