Thursday, August 04, 2005

From Journaling to Blogging?

Several times over the years, I have started to keep a personal journal. Each time, the effort has failed, if one considers continuity of production to be a mark of success. All I have to show for my attempts at journal-keeping is a small collection of incomplete volumes and the knowledge that, unlike Ralph Waldo Emerson or Virginia Wolff, the world will never come to know me through daily jottings in some leather-bound chronicle of my life. It may be just as well -- I've been known to say and write things I later came to regret.

So I've turned my attention away from keeping a journal towards keeping a blog! Perhaps I just need an audience, or the fantasy of an audience, to stick with it. Journal-keeping is like talking to yourself on paper. Blogging feels more like a conversation, or at least one side of it. Even if my ramblings prove to be nothing more than a one-sided conversation, I can at least imagine that there may be someone out there reading it.

Moreover, blogging seems a more promising vehicle for expressing my views than the collection of unpublished letters to the editor and unanswered memos to public officials that clutters my filing cabinets. Of course, as a preacher, it's unlikely that blogging can compete with the power of the pulpit and the satisfaction it brings. It does, however, give me somewhere to preach the other six days of the week. Stay tuned!