ThinkBlog

Over the past weekend, I discovered the blog of an old friend of mine. We hadn’t really spoken in a very long time, probably a couple of years, but I felt like I was catching up on her life as I read through the posts.

But what really struck me was the honest transparency of her words, her doubts, her faith. Absolutely remarkable to me was the fact that she could articulate what she was thinking and put it out there with such clarity and glaring honesty … always honesty, that’s what I kept coming back to.

I started this site as a personal blog, and it really still is in the deepest sense of course; but there is always the temptation to relegate the deeply personal posts–the struggles, worries, everything that could possibly be used as ammunition against me at a later time, even years down the road–to either silence or private journals. When I was serving as secretary of the Philosophy Club at Greenville Technical College, there was a certain looming fear for us among certain of the professors about saying something that might come back to haunt us later, should we judge something to be different than what we’d already decided.

This kept us from making transcripts or verbatim catalogues of the meetings, though I tried to be faithful as possible in the records. I still wonder, though: why is it that we have to put ourselves up as being absolutely certain?

This is not a freedom that I will lightly allow myself. Heretofore you would be hard pressed to read openly of some crises of faith, trials of life, &c., except through the lines and behind the words themselves. This friend of mine of whose blog I have spoken tells of these very things with clarity and openness. (For respect of privacy I will add it to the linkblog only if I have her permission.)

Nevertheless, her refreshing perspective and openness has encouraged me to be a little more open myself. A very little, but at least that, mind you! Perhaps you’ll see an increase in the posts deposited in the “personal” category. Perhaps.

Over the past weekend, I discovered the blog of an old friend of mine. We hadn’t really spoken in a very long time, probably a couple of years, but I felt like I was catching up on her life as I read through the posts.

But what really struck me was the honest transparency of her words, her doubts, her faith. Absolutely remarkable to me was the fact that she could articulate what she was thinking and put it out there with such clarity and glaring honesty … always honesty, that’s what I kept coming back to.

I started this site as a personal blog, and it really still is in the deepest sense of course; but there is always the temptation to relegate the deeply personal posts–the struggles, worries, everything that could possibly be used as ammunition against me at a later time, even years down the road–to either silence or private journals. When I was serving as secretary of the Philosophy Club at Greenville Technical College, there was a certain looming fear for us among certain of the professors about saying something that might come back to haunt us later, should we judge something to be different than what we’d already decided.

This kept us from making transcripts or verbatim catalogues of the meetings, though I tried to be faithful as possible in the records. I still wonder, though: why is it that we have to put ourselves up as being absolutely certain?

This is not a freedom that I will lightly allow myself. Heretofore you would be hard pressed to read openly of some crises of faith, trials of life, &c., except through the lines and behind the words themselves. This friend of mine of whose blog I have spoken tells of these very things with clarity and openness. (For respect of privacy I will add it to the linkblog only if I have her permission.)

Nevertheless, her refreshing perspective and openness has encouraged me to be a little more open myself. A very little, but at least that, mind you! Perhaps you’ll see an increase in the posts deposited in the “personal” category. Perhaps.