Some Things Personal

Ok, I was feeling pretty good about this whole blog thing.  Look at all the posts.  I am like totally destroying last year’s number of posts.  Granted, two is not difficult to totally destroy, but still.  Blogging, enjoyable, driving production of written words, keeping goals and having fun at the same time, what could be better, aside from a run-on sentence I didn’t take time to tame but somehow managed to make sense?  Then someone griped.  They said I should put something personal on here to let people know about me, like that would be interesting.  So, I abdicate once again to the gripers.  Here are some personal things.

Personal thing #1:

I am a pastor.  I have been a pastor for sixteen years and some change.  Very early a wise old man who was also a pastor told me if I could find anything else to do that would satisfy the call, to do it instead.  I never found that other thing and he was right.

Personal thing #2:

I hate prefixed-literature.   Any kind of writing with a word in front of it, I hate.  This includes Christian, feminist, gay, and whatever else you can think of.  I understand genre.  That’s fine.  I get it.  But please, can we judge a work on the merits of the work and not on the current geo-political-gender-race-sexual orientation-red state – blue-state prism?  Nice writing is nice writing and if I’m really grooving on a writer I’ll take the time to see what’s behind the story.  Otherwise, I don’t need to have it sliced and diced and pre-prepared for my consumption based on a marketing cluster. 

Personal thing #3:

I have a thing about how we no longer have privacy.  I’m not sure we appreciate that fact, as a culture or as individuals.  If I worked for the FBI and wanted to create a national database that kept track of people, where they live, what they do, what they think, and who their friends and enemies are, while keeping data-entry costs non-existent, the perfect system would be facebook.  I know how that sounds and I’m really not a tin-foil hat kinda guy, but then again…  Like I said, I have a thing.  I’m reticent about being too personal on the internet.  I’m cautious about it. 

Personal thing #4:

I like to write.  In my brain this blog is mostly an outlet for creative writing and an initial foray into creating a home-base for some planned ebooks (stay tuned).  Think about what it means to be a pastor who likes to write creatively.  The preconceived notions of what pastors are supposed to be swarm like angry hornets.  For example, everything I write is supposed to be pure and inspiring and about the Bible.  I should never ever cast a cold unflattering light on people of faith, and should maintain a caricature-ish and awkwardly simple level of fiction, a la Ned Flanders.   Right?  No cussin’, no sex, no blood, no nothing like that and the good guys always, and I mean always, win.  Deus ex machina was a plot device before it was a cool video game.  Look it up.

Personal thing #5:

I'm a smelly human.  I was a smelly human way before I answered the call to be a pastor.  I have smelly human thoughts, I've experienced smelly human experiences, and sometimes my writing reflects these experiences.  I mean, have you seen the world?  That's the life I've known and what's so graceful about the Grace of God is that it shines through anyway.  Despite our best efforts there are still blessings and wonderful things.