The Prodigal Blogger Returns, Again!

I had a crisis of content! I found myself just reacting to other people’s prompts, but not really adding content that signified what my blog site was meant to represent. As a result, I stopped feeling motivated to write, and I lost the passion and the words to do so.

Nearly every day, I prayed to God the Father to show me how to renew my passion, but when I tried, I just couldn’t do it. I spent my time reading the words and looking at the photos of the literally hundreds of blog sites I follow.

Then, this week, I started a Masterclass by Roxane Gay on Writing for Social Change, and although I don’t think of social change and social commentary as my goals, when she spoke of writing with intentionaly and purpose, I came face-to-face with the notion that over the last couple of years I have been blogging (I think this will be year four), I hadn’t sat down and asked myself the difficult questions of what do I want to say each day, what are my motivations for blogging, and why are my words important for others to read?

I think that I became a reactive blogger, rather than an intentional blogger, to increase my likes and comments. Those first months were dispiriting, and as a Christian, I know not to despise small beginnings. Yet, when I started to write stories and poems from the prompts, my numbers started to rise and I felt useful and a little bit of hot stuff.

But, what I forgot was that in blogging, as in all of life, you need some kind of road map, even if occasionally you diverge from it to follow an unseen road, hoping for a unexpected adventure, which, more often than not occurs, at least in my experiences. The problem is that I have, basically, remained on the unseen road, not getting back to the real reason for the journey.

I had to go back and read the About and Mission pages, and then ask myself if I were being true to my intentions, and for the most part, I have done what I wanted to do, which is inspire people to love each other and see each other’s humanity, regardless of the social categories we have constructed that often makes one group appear superior and the other groups as inferior Others.

Yet, I plan to spend the next few days answering the questions I’ve neglected, attempting to be intentional, proactive, and purposeful. I love blogging so much, and my prayer to God was to help me reconnect with the passion that I originally brought to this enterprise.

I admit that I may have fallen into a depression precipitated by retirement, the ugliness of the recent political battles and the split in the Body of Christ that they engendered, the cornovirus, and feeling weird that the best-read of my posts have been the posts describing my weight-loss journey, which I didn’t think anyone else would be interested in enough to follow me. God really does have a sense of humor, and yes, humans make plans and God laughs, because He know the plans He has for our lives are so different from our own, at times.

But, it feels good to write a post today, to just feel I will once again connect with the people I have come to think of as friends, mentors, and fellow travelers. I hope you all are keeping safe. So many of you inspire me every day. Thank you.