A quieter blog

I love my blog. I like its theme, I like expressing thoughts in writing, and I like interacting with readers. Despite this, I’ve decided to cut back on blogging. My decision does not reflect a desire to put my mind on a shelf somewhere, and become one of those mythical faceless housewives without opinions or even rational thought. In an attempt to prove this, I recently attended a public lecture titled “Climate Change: Complexities, uncertainties, urgency, and equity”. Huh!? I am also going to attempt to answer some questions about democracy, which I neglected to notice all week - sorry! It is also not because I have no ideas about what to write anymore. That has never been a problem for me! I’ve made this decision for a few reasons that God has been revealing to me over recent months.

My main role in daily life is to be a helper to my husband. “Does this help my husband” is the question that helps me to sift the important from the less important. When I ask Dave what he’d like me to do, he never says “I’d love it if you’d blog about ____”. He is more likely to say “Please make another animal patch for the baby’s quilt”. He is far more excited about me learning to bottle food, and being willing to wash cloth nappies, than he is about me writing about stewardship and dominion. Don’t get me wrong. Dave loves my mind, and my writing. He loves it that I have reasons for what I believe, and that I am interested in current events. He just isn’t all that passionate about blogs.

I’ve also had a niggling feeling that perhaps I ought not to have so much to say. Those warnings in Proverbs about sin accompanying many words come to mind. There is nothing like marriage to show up how much one has to learn. Except, perhaps, the additional blessing of becoming a mother to a tiny child. Many people have told me I write well. Perhaps in twenty years my writing will be worth listening to. In the mean time, I want to spend more of my time listening to those whom history has sifted and deemed worthy. I want to soak myself in biographies and old hymns, in puritan prayers and Bible passages memorized and repeated countless times.

There are many things in life I long for almost desperately. I long for my life to count for something in eternity . . . for our children to love Jesus more than we do . . . for our home to be a place of beauty, of productivity, of joy, of prayer, of passion . . . to give, not to want . . . to have a gentle and quiet spirit . . . to be unworried about the sins and opinions of others . . . to love people I find difficult . . . to love the church . . . to respond rightly to the problems in Dave’s first country . . . even, oddly enough, to learn Zulu. I’ve come to question how much keeping up a blog, and spending 1 - 6 hours a week on it, contributes to those things. So you’ll still find me here at “A Deeper Love”, but only in the last week of every month, and maybe with fewer words to say.