a blogger’s journey
A month ago the Trinity Thological College’s alumni magazine published something I wrote for them about my blogging journey. As I will be away on a silent retreat in Chiengmai, Thailand, and don’t know if there is internet access there, I have here reproduced it to re-affirm the value of blogging for pastors and others. Hope you benefit from reading it :
With apprehension I entered blogosphere. I was computer-illiterate and internet-ignorant. I was not sure what it was all about except that it was a way of journaling your experiences online for your friends and anyone with internet access. I kept debating if it was worth the while, and whether I had the time. When I finally decided to plunge into this new technology, it was my son who helped me start a blog. Gradually I learned how to navigate in this new world, and my initial anxiety gave way to a surprising confidence.
This was because I experienced some benefits of blogging. There were many young people and some adults in the church who blogged. As I read about their struggles, hopes, joys, and their responses to different life and church experiences, my empathy for them deepened. These are real people with real work and school pressures. In fact, reading their blogs naturally led to inserting an encouragement or prayer for them.
It also helped bridge the gap between the pulpit and the pew. The perception of the “holy manâ€, distant and different from us, is laid to rest, as they read about a pastor with a wife, three teenage children and a mother with Alzeimer’s. They realize I can be opinionated, indeed quirky about some matters. They see my ordinariness and feel like they know me better.
I also influenced them intentionally and share how I live and serve God and how I view different aspects of life. I do not need to have the “correct†biblical perspective on all issues, and I constantly took risks and expressed my opinions and listened to comments which further shaped my ideas.
Blogging invited me to reflect on life experiences and ministry regularly and helped me to cultivate an awareness of how I reacted to what went on around me. It also opened my eyes to God’s activity in my life, work and in the world. Pastoring is demanding and these pauses for reflection kept my perspectives balanced and helped me keep my emotional life healthy.
I also realized that more people are usually reading your blog than you realize. Some of them do drop in and comment and a kind of on-line acquaintance is developed. Of course there are limitations with such rapport but it is nevertheless interesting and fun. On a rare occasion an hostile comment may be made. Once an online visitor “christisevil†inserted anti-christian comments on my post. Then I discovered that his blogname actually meant “Christ-is-evilâ€. I simply deleted his comments and barred him from further entry.
Blogging has now become my favourite way to keep in touch with friends, especially those overseas. They write and read whenever and as often as they want to, and respond with comments. Its more versatile then email or newsletters, looks better, feels current, and is free of charge.
I have a friend who blogs because he wants his archived posts to be a kind of legacy to his children and grandchildren, a treasure box of his heartfelt reflections about life and God, of the kind of father or grandfather he was. We are talking about data storage that can trace and endure several generations.
Recently my Trinity Theological College classmates gathered for a reunion and one of them expressed interest in blogging and has since become an avid blogger. Once separated by distance we have since been more able to be in sync with what we are both experiencing and thinking, he in Bolivia and I in Singapore. It got me thinking that with an alumni that is international, and most with ministries that are demanding, if Trinity graduates and lecturers, wherever internet is possible, could just blog regularly, whether weekly, fortnightly or monthly, it could become an internet community that sustains the sense of belonging which usually fades away after graduation. Why should community and learning cease on graduation when it is most needed after graduation, when we are in the thick of our life’s work?
Add comment November 14th, 2006
