New Year’s Day
“Welcome to the world of the deep, where the strangest things are the people you meet.” - Hazel Barton, microbiologist and cave explorer
When I was 19, old enough to think I had learned it all and young enough to not know better, I started my first blog. I had great expectations for My Father’s Study. It would outdistance its competition, The Art of Manliness, within a year, taking the place of the recently fallen Vision Forum Ministries and my late hero, Doug Phillips. It would catch the collective eyes of the Harris brothers of Do Hard Things fame, the Botkin family, and half the civilized world.
History would tell that My Father’s Study did none of these things, except history fails to mention it at all. The powerful content of inspirational theology galvanizing a generation of men failed to touch anyone beyond my circle of friends. No one seemed to notice its existence. Or mine.
But it wasn’t a total failure. I grew as a man despite my obsession with manliness culture. God was teaching me.
My Father’s Study closed its doors one year after birth, but a champion took its place. A blog about the written word (and how good I was at it), American Wordsmith was arrayed in the epicurean robes of a master artist: snobbish, elitist, and uber-professional. Whereas My Father’s Study made the fatal error of depending only on its content and word-of-mouth, American Wordsmith was armed with Twitter, photo-headings, guest posts on other blogs, and a nifty mailing list. Guard your Pulitzers, Tom Wolfe; they are the last ones you will win and I’m younger than you.
To my surprise and despite a commotion that would lead one to believe otherwise, American Wordsmith’s readership swelled to none greater than my circle of friends. A year later, it too, folded.
I stopped blogging but I still craved greatness – something big enough to make up for the smallness in myself. The chants of a thousand people screaming my name to drown out my own distaste. So I chased the footsteps of another hero, since fallen as they all seem to in the end. I strayed far from who I was, and though I wouldn’t admit it at the time, that was sort of the point.
A friend told me to write to the audience I have, not the one I want. I suspect he knew. In my previous blogs, I wrote for the masses of Beautiful People I hoped to enthrall, when it was my friends who were reading. Now I write for the audience I have, which at the moment is me. It doesn’t need to be bigger.
The grand ambitions I had for my blogs, other Great Works, and life in general required detailed plans; plans I never lacked and plans that never came true. Instead, God lead me in a humble path I would never have chosen to a destination yet to be determined. Though my life has been to this point largely a series of disappointments, I have learned lessons I would not trade even for herohood.
I am no longer a schemer, a mastermind attempting to wrest control from the One who loves me more than I do and works all things together for my good, regardless of what I want. He is in control – I surrender. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding, but in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your path straight.”*
I take it one day at the time, seeking to be faithful, not with what I want to have but with what I do have, and trust Him with where it will lead. That’s the way my Father made His life and art.**
By the calendar, it is two years since American Wordsmith’s swan song. I am older, and any other adjectives are yet to be determined. But I am ready to begin again. My hope in whatever follows is to transcribe some ideas that are shaping my life. I want to remind myself and share them with anyone who is listening.
Carpe diem.
J.
*Proverbs 3:5-6
**Lana Del Rey
July 11, 2018