The Constant Gardener

A Blog is like a garden . . .requiring constant attention . . . otherwise it becomes stale. I’ve failed in my previous attempts at Blogging because I am just too busy. I’m trying to make an effort to keep this one going. It isn’t like I don’t have enough to say . . . there’s plenty. Each time I sit down to write, I have to consider which, of a thousand things do I discuss today.

I again spent some time searching the Blogosphere, looking to see if someone else is meeting this exact need . . . and there’s not. If there is, I haven’t found them yet. I’ve listed some links that I think are interesting and good. Some of them are more scholarly than I intend to be here. I mean, I could be scholarly. I do have a book manuscript about what went wrong with American Evangelicalism (that I researched for two years including traveling to the heart of the Renaissance). But if I had to write at that level with each posting, this garden would wilt under the sun. It just takes too much time.

But the niche of this Blog is between the mainstream Evangelical scholarly people (as excellent as they are), the radical “burn all the churches” Emerging Church people and the strictly satirists. Speaking of the satirists, I re-discover The Door yesterday and spent some time reading it. It was refreshing to see that other Christians can look at the nonsense of Evangelicalism, talk about it, but not see themselves as cynical – liberals.

Again, this Blog is to be a quiet, smooth place in the wilderness where I want to confirm your disenchantment, in a positive way. To tell you that you are not crazy. That Evangelicism is a farce at times . . . but God is there and there is a way to relate to him (and fellow Christians) honestly. As I’ve said before, I don’t have all the answers of how us, disenfranchised, survive but I have a lot of the answers.

I do not garden in real life, but my wife does. Last year I tried to start my first garden. While my wife does it roughly (coming from a farming family), she doesn’t depend on neatness. So I built this wonderful, raised bed, garden. I planted great crops. I watered it and watched in sprout . . . then all heck broke loose. Work consumed me as did my kids and home repairs. The next time I went out, there were more weeds than crops. I cleaned them up. Then, weeks later, my wife informed me that my garden was “going to seed.” It was true. My wonder Swiss Chard, and mixed greens, tomatoes etc were rotten or wasted because I wasn’t there to harvest them.

Well, I hope to make this Blog different. In the future I want to explore more of the true Biblical view of mental illness ( I have a lot to say about that). And to discuss survival techniques when you feel completely alone within the Christian world . . . caught between wanting to have Christian friends and a place to belong . . . but wanting to be honest.

More later: