I will try to explain my absence as well as I possibly can. It could possibly be chalked up to being busy, which I have been. Life, job, other extracurricular activities that required my attention. Or it could be attributed to being sick, which I most certainly was around Christmas. Or having a new baby in the house, or any other of a thousand reasons.
But none of them would be quite completely true. Because they aren't the real, deep, underlying reason. The real reason is pretty simple. I suppose you could call it literary despair. Let me explain.
2012 had been a pretty eventful year, packed from one end to the other with intellectual, emotional, political, and religious happenings of every size and shape, from the HHS mandate to the Supreme Court's decision to uphold Obamacare. It was a year of a certain kind of hope, that maybe finally, the long four-year drudgery of Obama's presidency was finally reaching its end. That maybe the country would turn a corner, make a real change, demand a good leader. I hoped and prayed along with everyone else who hoped and prayed the same thing. I begged that God's will be done with America (a double-edged sword of a prayer, I know.)
I wrote to convince, I wrote to persuade, to possibly add a modicum of sense that had not existed in the argument before. I wrote from my heart about things I thought people should hear. I linked to other people's writings that were more eloquent than my own.
And then I allowed myself, to some degree, to get plowed under. Obama got reelected, bad policy became firmly cemented in place, the attacks on my religion and my church increased. The heavy hand of a faraway tyrant became more ever-present: on this New Year when my taxes went up, for the past couple weeks with all this asinine "discussion" concerning guns and gun control, the constant din of divisive and dangerous rhetoric from both sides of a dysfunctional government.
I honestly despaired that my writing had any effect whatsoever on the discussion, any purpose other than to occupy my time. I am a person who likes to see the results, and I was not seeing them. So I stopped.
And I realize that stopping was an enormous mistake on my part. For all honest dialogue, all honestly considered and honestly spoken thought, is worth hearing. Maybe I get things wrong, or nobody listens, or my words drown in the sea of other voices saying sort of the same thing as me. But it shouldn't matter. Because, as my wife so eloquently posted on the wall over my computer, "I am a writer, I will write." God gave me the gift of putting words together in a way that makes some amount of sense. You will be the judge of how much sense I make, I am sure. But I will be damned if I don't use that gift anyways, for my own benefit if not for yours too.
So my New Year's resolution, if I have one at all (I honestly hate New Year's resolutions) is to keep pouring out some part of my soul onto this corner of cyberspace and not worry so much about the concrete results it may or may not have. Because, if I speak truth, and I hope that I do more often than not, then it benefits somebody out there.
So as I like to say, Be Aware. And God bless. I promise to stick around. Will you?
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