Jeremy L. Berg

From the old DI archives, here’s a piece written in 2006 comparing my blogging habits to the spiritual life. At that time I had lost inspiration and quit blogging for weeks before finally posting this.  -JB

Yes, I was dead. My pages were stilled. My message was silenced. Some faithful readers came by to visit my remains – the echoes of a past life. Some were saddened. Some were indifferent. Others were relieved, thinking one less blog to check up on. But the blogger’s grave will not have the last word here.

“Behold, I am making all things new!” The trumpet has sounded. The cyber earth has shook. What do we have here? Another word, another message, another sign of life on the other side of the blog. Someone is still at the controls of Daily Illumination. He has not abandoned his once inspired, sometimes creative, always truthful portal of human expression. I’m back from the grave. Another blogger has been resurrected…

But…

But I’m afraid my blog might become a living parable of the current state of many Christians. Let me explain. See, I’ve meant to write often. But each day I felt I had nothing special to say, nothing of value to contribute to the blogosphere. So i remained silent. I kept to myself.

Then i thought, what if i could just come up with one great blog to get things rolling again? Or one good attempt to let my friends know that i’m still breathing, still in the game? Or, perhaps I could just fake it a little, try to come up with a clever line, steal a decent poem, post a happy, lively photo to cover my own lack of inspiration, my overly busy schedule, my weariness and depleted blogger-energy reserve. At least nobody would question whether I had indeed quit blogging.

Being a Christian has similar dynamics at play. We are called to be active contributors to the kingdom of God, to invest our creative energies in the cause of furthering the Kingdom. Like blogging, we have moments of enlightenment, God-bathed experiences that we can’t wait to share with others and “post it to God’s Kingdom web.”

Yet, most days are consumed with a myriad of mundane busywork. We can’t find the time to make a meaningful contribution, to “post a blog” in God’s Kingdom, to do something kingdom-expanding and of lasting worth. Most days we feel like we have nothing meaningful, creative, inspiring, funny, or worthy of offering up to the Blog Master in the Sky. So we remain silent. We remain inactive because we don’t feel inspired. We feel like our life isn’t worth publishing and reading.

Like blogging, we wonder if anyone ever notices our contributions anyway. Maybe nobody even notices my “posts” in the Kingdom. We compare our “posts” to others’ posts, and conclude that they are more gifted and creative and funny and inspiring and worthy of reading. But, we conclude, nobody benefits from my meager contributions.

I am totally against “Faking it” in both the blogosphere and the Kingdom of God. That’s why i never blog when I seem to be forcing something. I try to never just fill a day to humor my readers, or just keep active enough to let others I’m still alive. If I don’t feel it, I don’t do it. Therefore, I’m in no danger of becoming a Pharasaic blogger — just painting the outside of the blog, but nothing beneath the message. I try to be an honest blogger where their is a human being behind the words on the screen.

Instead, I become an overly busy, uninspired, weary blogger who goes missing for a month. People wonder if I’ve quit blogging. Did he throw in the towel? Have we seen the death of Jeremy’s blog? How many of us take this route in our faith? We don’t “feel it” anymore, so we just stop producing, stop engaging, stop showing up, stop contributing, stop believing, stop “fighting the good fight”?

We’re not going to fake it, so we just go missing for awhile. We wait for that moment of inspiration, that spiritual break-through, that enlightenment or religious experience that temporarily jump starts our faith engine again. But sometimes that “moment” never seems to come. What then?

Well, here’s my two cents on “keeping the faith” and “resurrecting the blog”: Faith is not a feeling we depend on. We must not go from moment to moment and base our life on an intermittent feeling or a fleeting sense of the divine that comes and goes with our shifting moods. We base our faith on what God has already done and what God is still doing through Jesus Christ and his movement of followers, the church. We get up each day and “decide” that we are going to participate in Jesus’ Kingdom of God movement whether we feel like it or not. We bring whatever level of inspiration we have to the task that day. We bring all or nothing — whatever we have that day.

We are honest with one another, but we are not silent. We are present to one another, and don’t go missing, whether or not we feel we have anything of value to offer that day. Those are two huge aspects of Kingdom living: showing up (being present) and opening up (being authentic about out ‘rut’).

Well, every analogy has its breaking points, and blogging and ‘Kingdom-living’ are world’s apart. For one, we don’t need to blog everyday to be a faithful, effective blogger. But we do need to “take up our crosses daily” and follow Jesus’ revolutionary way every step (to the best of our ability). But let me add just one more insightful parallel between the two.

One of my greatest frustrations with the church has been its tendency to celebrate so energetically the Resurrection of our Lord on Easter and then downplay the New Life that is supposed to follow from it. We base our faith on the great climactic Cross and Resurrection events of our Lord Jesus (rightly so) that assures us eternal life, but then never enter into our own personal processes of “dying to our old life/selves” and “walking in the newness of life found in the power of the Spirit” in this life.

My fear as I announce the resurrection of my blog is that I will follow suit. I fear that I will blow the trumpet here on October 23, 2006, announce the revival of my blogging life, and then never post again! Or blog whenever i “feel like it”. What kind of a strange resurrection announces the arrival of fresh life and then never begins to step into it and bear new fruit? What kind of a strange gospel is that?

Sounds a little silly. I don’t think i want to be apart of a group of people who proclaim the availability of new life, new power, new purpose and then never step into that reality and live it out, but remain forever trapped in the old realty honoring the status quo.

Well, hopefully my faith journey is more fruitful and lively than my blogging journey these past days. Peace!