Learning from a Decade of Blogging

I received the notice yesterday that marked a decade of this blog.

A decade!  It doesn’t feel so long.  And yet, though I am a sinner and a promise-breaker who has failed my share of pacts, this one promise has somehow endured.  Ten years ago, I told God that if nothing else, I’d write for Him here, and that I would try to exercise as best I could whatever gift He had given me.  Somehow, with a few breaks here and there for vacations and tragedies, I have kept up with it.

What, then, does one learn in a decade of blogging about God?

That God is bigger than I ever imagined, of course.  That He encompasses more than I could have ever dreamed and can be present with me and to me in ways that still surprise me.  That He has been here, the presence in my life persistently shaping and changing me, over a time that spans a great deal of change in me and in the world.  That—I should be honesty here—somehow His evident presence has not been enough to at times keep me from doubting and struggling.  My comfort is only that, at least in this regard, I have good Scriptural company.

I have learned that God makes us stronger than we think we are, or that rather He becomes our strength when we feel weakest.  That He is working in ways we can’t see in a day, month, or year.  Looking back over ten years I am surprised by the things that I didn’t think I ever could have done or endured, and yet did.  That’s God.  I look back over the life-altering wonderful surprises I didn’t expect, and that’s God, too.  Every year I find myself in situations where I ask if I can trust God to be good this time, and He always is.  (And He always forgives me for asking).  That’s God.

But I’ve also learned that I am more fragile than I think I am: a vapor, a grass, and at times much given to sorrow and hurt.  These ten years have spanned so many things: the losses of family members, including my mother, the losses of dear church congregants, changes in career and employment, tragedies for friends and family, church and location changes.  I have learned that life is far harder than I ever dreamed it could be, and sometimes far more painful.  I have also learned that God is preciously, differently available to us in those times than we might imagine.

What I’ve learned the most, though—perhaps to the great benefit of my Christian walk—is that sometimes the act of greatest wisdom is to shut up, to listen, to allow for possibilities.

In my earliest blog posts, what I see (that is perhaps not visible to others, but is to me) is the sense of surety and instruction I felt writing some of them.  Do this, I advised, and then this.  I seemed so certain of everything, so confident.  I was, in some ways, the chirpy voice I’ve come to sigh at on places like Pinterest and social media: God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world, am I right ladies????

I’m joking.  I don’t think I was ever that bad.  But I do think the younger you are and the less you’ve experienced the easier is it to toss out spiritual truths without thinking about how they might land for someone who isn’t you.   When you haven’t experienced doubt or suffering—the kind that really rocks your world—then the voice you speak with won’t necessarily be leavened with the compassion learned from those situations.  Over time, what we love—and what we lose—teaches us to speak with greater depth and understanding.  Teaches us (especially the answer-y, teach-y among us) that the greatest act of love is to refrain from teaching or instructing or answering to just sit with people.

The thing that hasn’t changed, though, is that I genuinely want people to know God is good.

This is something it almost feels like I am being re-taught in my life right now.  To be clear, I have always and experienced that God is good.  But my understanding of how God is good is deepening in two ways that I don’t think I’ve ever been fully able to articulate:

1. God is good in ways we do not understand or may not be able to grasp.  God is good even in times of suffering and sorrow.  There is a rich depth to God’s goodness at these times.  But because we do not feel good at those times we may experience God’s goodness more in a sort of retrospect.  Or, God may be intervening in our life for one reason or another in a way we literally can’t see that only becomes clear later.  Sometimes God’s goodness in our lives is a mystery: a wonderful something-or-other at work that we may not have language to articulate or immediately understand.  To trust in this goodness requires a recognition that my present reality may not be fully representative of what is happening spiritually; an embrace of the “dark night of the soul”; a recognition that at times we may not be experiencing reassuring evidences of God’s presence may be times He is most at work in us.

2. God is good and will always be good “in the land of the living,” and in ways we can understand and see.  Psalm 27:13 is Scripture’s very pertinent reminder that God’s goodness is not just something we are going to experience in the abstract future or in some ideal, far-flung way but in the right here and the right now.  Tangible stuff.  Real-world, hey-this-made-me-feel-great stuff.  That doesn’t mean God’s goodness is primarily material—like financial prosperity or physical health, though it certainly can be—but that we are going to experience God’s goodness as….well, good.  As joy.  As delight.  As gladness.  We will feel that.  We will experience it.

Strangely enough, that feels like the greatest of the truths my new church is teaching me.  That there is a current joy to be had in walking with God; a current delight; a current redemption; a current freedom.  And yes, all of these things in the future too: but now, especially now.  There will be light on the other side of the valley of the shadow of death, but there is light right now, right here, with us.  We will feel it and will see by it.  It will transform us.

Some of you have stuck around with me for a very long time—the bulk of this decade.  Others may be new.  Bless you all, and thanks for walking this journey with me. If God wills me another decade, I wonder what it might teach?