Closing up shop and moving

As of today, this blog is officially closed. It has been as good as closed for the last eleven months because I just had too much on my plate to blog. I found my breaking point, however, and have scaled back my schooling to try and make my life more livable. I really want to see my family more. If you try to do too much, you can't do any of it well, it seems. My life should be slowing down now to the point where I could start blogging again.

So why close up shop, and not just start back up here? Because I have been invited to join my friends at The A-Team Blog, and will be blogging there starting this week. I'm excited to be a part of a group blog of such calibre, and will be posting regularly once a week there. Please come check it out!

I am grateful for the experience I gained in doing this blog, and will leave it up as a record of my work. Thanks to those of you who read, and I hope to see you over at the new site!

No, I'm not dead!

At least not yet. But this spring has been one of the most difficult periods of my life for a number of reasons, and blogging was forced to a much lower place on the priority list than it was before.

So here I am, a good four - almost five - months since I last posted an entry, and I'm wondering if there's still anyone who bothers to read such a derelict blog. One of the things that has kept me away, however, has been my masters program studies, for which I have produced a fair amount of material that I would like to post here. But I'm just sort of curious - is there anyone still out there who's reading? If so, could you please let me know in the comments?

Thanks, and sorry for being gone so long.

State of the Blog Address

My fellow blogosphereans...

Thank you to those of you who have stopped by to read my blog over the last year. I'm grateful that a) you found my thoughts interesting enough to read, and b) some of you actually took the time to enter into a discussion or two with me. My main purpose in starting this blog was admittedly selfish, but that selfishness itself had a selfless goal. I wanted to stretch myself, to grow through the discipline and practice of communicating my thoughts in writing ,and through exchanges with other minds on the various views I've presented (hence the caption below the blog title, and the title itself). But the chief end was not to grow for myself; it was to grow to be of better service to my Lord. I think that has certainly happened this year.

Embedded in that goal of self-growth for service, however, were some personal goals for myself that I found to be more challenging to achieve than I had anticipated. I feel I have failed to fully live up to one in particular: namely, posting as frequently as I would have liked with contributions of substance. I would have liked to have posted more developed entries with greater regularly and frequency, but writing is hard work, particularly when the demands of a career, family and church often eliminate my time for blogging for long stretches. There's also a weird love-hate thing that develops between a blogger and his blog, which I didn't understand before, but totally get now. If you blog, you know what I mean. Suffice it to say that a strange sort of psychological intimidation has sometimes kept me away longer than I would have liked.

All that to say, it really has been a rewarding experience, and my thanks go out to those of you who have helped it be just that. It's time now, though, to look to the future. What will 2008 mean for this blog?

Well, my intent is to keep it going, but there's been one major change in my life that will probably impact my expectations for The Crucible. I'm going back to school! Next week I begin classes towards getting my MA in Christian Apologetics from Biola University. Specifically, because of my location and family commitments, I'm doing the Modular Program (a distance program that combines online classwork with summer on-campus residencies) which will probably take me around three years to complete.

I'm very excited, and I know that this is a great next step for me as I seek to develop my gifts for service to the Kingdom, but the demands placed on me will most definitely impact my blogging habits. I hope to be able to incorporate some of what I am doing in my classes with my postings here, but I'm not quite sure how that's all going to play out yet. I've also entertained thoughts of bringing another author on to the blog to help out. I'm not sure yet, and I think I'll just have to wait and see how things go.

After a year here my desire to grow and for this blog to be a vehicle for that has not changed - if anything, the former has grown. Please bear with me as I figure out just how this new facet of my education and growth will affect the latter. And thanks again for reading.

God bless.

Happy birthday, blog!

Whoops! Looks like I missed it by a day. It's been a year of up-and-down blogging for me on my trial run of this thing, but overall I'm glad I did it. I'll save the rest of my reflections and future plans for my next post - my "State of the Blog Address." Stay tuned!

Merry Christmas!

My oldest son is four, and the whole Christmas thing is really getting fun now. I had to tuck him in super-fast, so he could go to sleep and get to Christmas morning sooner. It is really special to view Christmas through the eyes of a child again.

Merry Christmas, everyone (and to my friends across the pond, Happy Christmas)!

Since God became flesh and dwelt among us, I pray that you would truly behold His glory this season and, if you don't already know Him, find out just who the man was that baby grew to be.

The Gaze of the Holy God

Though I am a big fan of RC Sproul and a joyful supporter of Ligonier Ministries, I had not yet gotten around to reading what some consider to be his most powerful book - The Holiness of God. Written over twenty years ago, it is considered a standard work and a masterpiece by almost every Christian reviewer I've read. Finally deciding to take it up, I read the first chapter last night, and would like to describe my experience.

I say experience rather than thoughts because I am beginning to understand why many people have called this a life-changing, send-you-to-your-knees kind of book. Most say they finished it in a single sitting, and it left them forever changed. Thankfully my wife is sick, and I didn't want to keep the light on, or I'm sure I would have stayed up all night (as I've often done in the past) to finish the thing.

Be that as it may, after I read the first chapter, entitled "The Holy Grail" (in which RC recounts the first time that he, as a young Christian, really caught a glimpse of God's holiness), I lay awake in bed staring blindly at the darkened ceiling. I could not sleep. I was laid bare to the core. I felt the great weight of the gaze of the Almighty, the Eye of Heaven, Creator of the universe, stripping my heart bare, and I knew that I was as nothing compared to Him who saw into my innermost parts. It was truly awful, in the literal sense of the word - a moment full of awe, my finitude glimpsing His infinitude; my hidden deceits exposed to His pure, terrible goodness. I think I understand a very small part of what Isaiah meant when he said, "I am undone."

And yet, that was not all. There was not just this terrible weight. There was something else. As I lay there in bed, my heart an open window to heaven, I knew that I was known. I was - and am - known far better that I will ever know myself. And if His presence was strong, his chiding was gentle. Have you ever seen the gentleness of great strength? Say, a man, whose hands could crush you, tenderly holding a newborn, a "gentle giant," as my mom says? With my walls down, there was no need to thunder at me. And this gentleness spoke to me of love (though a terrifyingly infinite love). It was not a force that gazed into my heart, that made it's immense weight felt in my soul; it was a Person.

I am no artist, but this experience left me with more of a mental image than words, so I thought I'd try to reproduce it here. I don't know if this is any more elucidating than my inadequate words, but I couldn't get the image out of my head. Go easy on me :)

I have no idea if any of this makes sense, or if I'm coming close to describing the impression God left on me last night. I do know that, though I've been a Christian for years, and have gained glimpses of God's holiness before, He opened my eyes to Him in a way that I sorely needed and which echoes RC's own experience. I get exactly what he's saying. I hope to offer a review of the whole book here once I'm done, but if the first chapter and my previous experience with Sproul's teaching are any indication, this one's going right to my top five list of most-recommended books.

Gone again...

Just wanted to let everyone know I'll be gone for the rest of this week. My wife and I are celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary, and we'll be gone on a trip - without the kids, no less. Needless to say, I won't be blogging :)

God willing, regular new posts will continue starting next week.

And thank you, Amy, for being my love and companion for the last decade. Every man should be blessed to have a wife like mine.

Defensiveness and guilt

I find I am the most defensive when I am feeling particularly guilty and inadequate. Are others no different?

Derailed again...

Well, life has been intensely busy the last few weeks, reducing any time I might have to sit down and blog to virtually zero. I didn't even have time to post THAT I wouldn't have time. Sorry (again). Things are looking up, though - I have grand ambitions of study and productivity for my free time this summer, and hopefully this blog will reflect that with some regular and consistent posts. Hang in there, my small cadre of valiant readers!

Arrgh!

I just had my first (and completely infuriating) experience of the internet eating a large blogpost - over an hour's worth of work. It was supposed to go up today. I'll see if I can't reconstruct it in time to still accomplish that.

Grrr. Well, lesson learned, I guess - work off of a Word document or something, rather than the Blogger page.

I'd rather be blogging

Some days, I wish I could make a living by blogging. Until such an opportunity comes up, I guess I'll keep my day job. I mean career.

March Madness

March Madness is here, and I ain't talkin' basketball. March is the busiest, most insane month for me with work (a total of ten separate major performance events), and so my posting here may be even more sporadic than normal for the next few weeks. My apologies to my readers - I'll try to get a few posts off at some point this month (though I'm not sure exactly how that's going to happen), but though you can expect to be seeing little new stuff around here in March, you'll definitely be getting more regular posts come April.

Minding My Marriage

The older I get, the more important it is to me that, above almost all else, my wife knows my mind. And the more deep contentment I feel knowing that she does. I have a truly amazing wife.

Sorry I've been gone...

...but life sometimes has no respect for blogging commitments. My family has, over the last two weeks, faced three separate virus strains, mostly hitting the kids, but not sparing my wife and me. Consequently, my time at home has been largely devoted to either being sick, taking care of sick kids, or helping my sick wife take care of sick kids. So to my small cadre of readers and friends, I'm sorry you haven't seen anything new here for a couple of weeks. I hope to continue posting regularly from here on out, though, so keep checking back, and thanks for reading!

Oh no - they're showing up already

That's right - bad blogging habits. This may be a carry-over from my normal writing habits, but it seems like every time I sit down to write a post, as I am composing it, about three new ideas for separate posts (tangentially related in differing degrees to the original) come to mind, and I must quickly open another document to jot it down before the epiphany is lost.

This post case in point.

The problem is that I see this as a good way to generate new posts - even to tie a few separate post thematically together - but it makes it darned difficult to get just one of the stinkin' things finished. I suppose I'm going to find a way to make the productive bit of this system work without impeding production more than it contributes, or I'll just have to dump the whole system. It's hard to change how you're wired, though. We'll see, I suppose. The upshot is that, when I do post, I'll probably have a lot to offer - at least quantity-wise.