The Spiritual Perils of Blogging, Part II — Envy

This is the second in my “Spiritual Perils of Bogging” series. Today I focus on Envy.

Envy is a danger inherent in any “public” work. As an academic, for example, publication is the coin of the realm. All academics compete for space in the presigious journals within their fields. It can be extraordinarily difficult to appreciate the work of other academics without thinking “why should he have gotten this great article placement — I could have done it better.” Sometimes there’s a temptation to criticize and discredit others out of envy. This is particularly the case early in an academic career when life is “publish or perish.”

The same dynamic can apply, I think, in the blogsphere. I know I’ve thought many times, “why does so-and-so get all that traffic? He doesn’t say anything remarkable. I should be the guy mentioned in Hugh Hewitt’s book, not him.” The motivation for maintaining and promoting a blog can become more to compete than to participate in a conversation.

Most of us in the “tail” of the faith-based blogsphere will need to make peace with the fact that we will never get to the fat part of the traffic curve. Maybe sometimes we “tail-ers” will have more of substance to say than the “big guys,” but our responsibility is to keep saying it as well as we can and to make it available as best we can. If God has plans to expand the influence of my little blog He’ll accomplish them, and if He doesn’t, I’ll try to be faithful to whatever His purposes might be.

For those of us who name Christ as Lord, our blogs, like anything else, are His to use as He sees fit. There’s no place, then, for any of us to envy the “success” of other bloggers. “Success,” after all, shouldn’t be counted in page hits, unique visits, or Instapundit mentions, but in faithfulness.