Month: April 2005

While I’m on vacation in Florida, I’ll recycle a few old posts. Here’s one of my posts in my “Spiritual Perils of Blogging” series:

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.

On vacation in Florida….

Uh, ok…

Does he look hungry?

Last night was the girl scout square dance. What a blast! A couple of hundred goofy, paunchy dads do-si-do’ing with their little girls in the high school gym. In addition to some good clean fun, I learned two things through this:

1. There are words to the “Chicken Dance” song. You know the dance — it starts with the chicken beaks, goes to the flapping wings, and then to the little tail wiggle. So picture that, with about a hundred little girls, singing spontaneously, in unison, and at the top of their lungs: “I don’t want to be a chicken, I don’t want to be a duck, so kiss my butt!” Where do they learn this stuff? I almost doubled over laughing.

2. All high school gymns are kept at a balmy 99 degrees and 90% relative humidity, they all look and smell the same, and as soon as you walk into them, they trigger long repressed memories of that whimpy kid who never could seem to do anything right, who never quite lived up to his potential, and who was mortally afraid that the other guys might notice his relative lack of hair in various manly places. You know, that “friend” of yours who grew up to become a lawyer or pastor or teacher or something, who wonders how he came to be living in a nice house full of little kids who call him “dad,” and who now spends way too much time in front of a computer screen talking to people he’s never even met.

Along with a number of other dads, I help with the “Tree Climbers” group at my local church. This is a group of rowdy six and seven-year-old boys, with the typical activities of a craft, some games (usually involving hitting the other boys with a red rubber ball, as in dodge ball), and a short Bible story.

We are covering the stories of Genesis, and my unenviable task last night was to tell the story of Jacob and Esau. You might recall from Genesis 25 that Jacob swindled Esau out of the birthright for a pot of stew, and from Gen. 27 that Jacob conspired with his mother (who didn’t get along with Esau’s wife) to trick his elderly and nearly blind father into giving him a blessing intended for Esau. You might also recall from Genesis 28 that the blessings of the Abrahamic covenant were passed on by God to Jacob through the “Jacob’s Ladder” dream rather than to Esau. And, you might remember Romans 9:13, in which God, explaining His election of Jacob, says “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” How do I explain this to six and seven-year-olds?

In tonight’s Globe Trekker, Zay Harding travels through Western Canada. Although Globe Trekker is usually the best show on TV, this one didn’t cut it. Harding is kind of boring — he lacks Ian Wright’s Brit snarkiness, Justine Shapiro’s sweet-but-superior affect, Shilpa Metha’s exotic sexiness, or Megan McCormick’s sense of girl-next-door fun. And, the location wasn’t culturally intersting. White water rafting might be fun to try, but it’s dull to watch. But the biggest turn-off was the frontier bar that maintains a tradition of serving a mummified human big toe floating in a scotch. You drink the scotch and let the toe touch your lips, whereupon the toe is returned to a cedar chest containing a selection of toes the bar has collected. Western Canadian culture at its best! Yuk!