To blog or not to blog

Confession:  I have avoided the blog.

I am not a blogger by nature.  I must have some strange complex that causes me to fear putting my thoughts ‘out there’ and not having a way to rescue them or take them back if someone decides they don’t like what I say or that I’m boring or whatever…. But then I remember how I fell in love.

Dec 5, 1997 I found myself sitting next to the most interesting guy at a Colts game.  I knew pretty close to nothing about football and even less about the Colts at that time so most of my attention was focused on the person to my right.  The night and game wore on.  I learned a few things I didn’t remember by the time I got to my car.  Intermission…oops I mean Halftime…was good because there was singing and dancing.  I wondered aloud about how many rehearsals…oops I mean practices…the team had before the next performance…oops I mean game.  You see, I am not wired a sports fan, but it was this night of sports that introduced me to him.   At the end of the night I was so sure he would want to talk to me again, but he did not ask me for my phone number.  Actually, he did not ask me for any form of contact information.  He merely asked if I had a computer in my dorm.  “Uh, yeah” I responded trying to hide my disappointment of spending an entire evening focused on a guy who was clueless to my brilliance and singleness.

The next morning I used my dial-up internet to check email.  I used to let it dial while I took a shower and then by the time I was out, my email was pretty close to ready to read!  And there he was.  NO…not there he was in my room when I got out of the shower!  There he was in email form.  The modern day courting process had begun.  (modern for 1997 anyway.)

We wrote.  We read.  We commented.  We blogged in a sense.  We knew very little about one another and so our thoughts ran freely on a bazillion subjects.  We had debates about whether pizza king or greek’s was the better Muncie pizza.  He shared his sweet and funny experiences of weekly meals with his aging grandfather.  I discussed my hope for direction after graduation and my fear of failing in the big world of professional music.  Our written conversations were thought-provoking, funny, insightful, maddening at times, and full of discovery.  By the time our first face to face date happened, we knew more about the deep places of the soul than most couples do after years of casual dating and movie-going.  I think you know the rest of the story.  We got married, had 2 kids, and still do a lot of emailing, texting, and writing to eachother in the midst of busy days!

So my point here is that there is a point.  Thinking, writing, processing, and sharing is the art of the blog and it brings people togther.  We don’t have to agree here.  We need only participate.  It’s still scary to put our thoughts out.  It’s still risky.  But we will come to know each other in meaningful, funny, and spiritual ways.

Lesson Learned: I will stop avoiding the blog.  Will you join our conversation?