On the way home from a week-long family trip to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, my thoughts raced around all that we had experienced. My wife and children were sleeping, and I was trying to focus my brain on fleshing out the theme for my keynote talks at a Family Camp for Nashville First Presbyterian Church coming up in a few weeks—but I simply couldn’t stop thinking about the Disney week.

It was at that point when I decided to finally start blogging. Oh, I’ve posted a bit here and there on group blogs, primarily on The Journal of Student Ministries blog. But my old boss, Mark Oestreicher, has been telling me for three years that I ought to start blogging. For several years before that, he told me I should be more active in online discussions: first, on the (now-defunct) YS Forums, then on Youth Ministry Exchange (well before YS acquired them), and also on other social networking sites.

I’ve avoided it frankly because I thought if I kept my nose to the grindstone and worked really hard for several years, I could eventually work my way into a position where I could spend the majority of my time reading, thinking, writing, and interacting with others about all of that instead of attending to so many (from my perspective) mundane tasks related to ministry and publishing. Well, I finally bit the bullet and started poking around on Facebook a bit (yeah, I know, I’m a bit of a late jumper-on in that area, too). But I like it a lot better than I thought. It’s really not consuming all that much time, and I’ve been able to reconnect to students I worked with two decades ago, writers I’d lost touch with, and even old classmates from high school and college.

The other tough thing about the blogosphere is that I really don’t read many other people’s blogs. Frankly, I like to have the content vetted a little more before I get to it. There’s way too much information and way too little time that I’d generally just as soon have someone else filter some of it before it gets to me. So it felt a little hypocritical to blog if I don’t really participate in reading or commenting on other people’s blogs. But then something else Mark Oestreicher told me has also been rumbling around in my head: “I try to do it as a spiritual discipline.”

That actually makes a lot of sense to me. For years, I’ve been the kind of youth minister who likes to have kids write things out: statements of faith, discipleship commitments, guiding values, prayers of confession—you name it. I suppose it’s the English teacher in me. In fact, when I went back into the public school classroom this year, I started every class period with a journal prompt to get kids writing and allow me to give them casual feedback on their writing skills without the pressure of it being for a grade. What I found (which shouldn’t have surprised me, really, but it did) was that it became not only my favorite thing to read at the end of each week but my most significant opening to their souls—and to ministry with them.

There’s something about being forced to articulate what’s rambling around within our minds and hearts that adds texture, depth, and meaning to the experience. It helps us notice where our values and actions are congruent or not, sift through our emotional responses to things, and provide clarity regarding God’s nudging in our lives.

So I guess it’s time. I’m really going to try to approach this endeavor less as an “assignment,” a marketing tool, or an added chore; I’m going to try to make this my spiritual discipline, as well. If there are others who’d like to journey with me by reading along, that would thrill me; if you’d like to comment, that would be great, too. But I’ll do my best to do this in such a way that even if God and I are the only ones reading it…well, then, that’ll be okay, too.

Blessings,

- Will