For most of my life, once a week I had to make sense of something. Once a week I preached to people who may have been listening to me for years. Like a teacher, it was my job to come up with a new memorable experience, but unlike teachers, the curriculum was less determined and the content expected to have more impact. I enjoy preaching and cherish the sub-processor of my internal CPU that is dedicated to amassing illustrations and approaches for the following Sunday.I am now in that sabbatical place where I am not preaching every Sunday but I am doing the blog thing every day or two. While I think of a sermon as a meal, with different courses and sauces, a blog post typically is smaller in length, scope, and impact: more of a late afternoon snack. I design sermons to have lots of room for listeners to find their own perspective on large issues, while the blog has fewer mythic properties.
A blog posting for me is at once more and less satisfying than a sermon. A good sermon throws away many good and interesting elements. As literary cognizoti have said, for a fine piece of writing you have to “kill your darlings.” A blog post is a darling. It’s a tidbit of opinion, a witty angle that may not profit from development at all, an isolated observation, a shiny grain of sand on the beach of human knowledge.
So dear readers, I offer my ambivalent apologies for posts you may find more like one smoked almond rather than a meal of fancy rice, steamed broccoli, and swordfish with bourbon sauce. Now I’m hungry.