I'm Not Good at This, Really!

By David Lawson

You who are reading this are reading a long-overdue entry. What I mean is that the Student Ministries staff passed on to me, probably over a week ago, the responsibility to write an entry to be posted “within the next day or two.” Well, that didn’t happen. And as I looked at the blog today, I can see that they have graciously taken up the slack.

You see, my failure to write the blog was not due to the usual reasons or excuses. Though I’m busy and have had a lot of responsibilities, meetings, planning, teaching preparation, and family duties over the last week or so, it hasn’t been unlike any other week. (Although acquiring a facebook account has given yet one more thing to do and check. If you were to look at my page, you’d see I haven’t done much there either.) It’s not that I forgot. How could I? I have this rolling pin on my desk that serves as a constant, nagging reminder of the responsibility I’ve been shirking over these past several days. I’m not opposed to writing a blog. Actually, I think it’s a good idea – so that’s not the reason, either.

You see, the real reason is that I have nothing to say. It’s not that I don’t have a lot of thoughts. I do. But I can’t seem to get past questions like, “Why would anyone want to know what I’m thinking?” “People have enough trouble keeping up with their own lives, why should I think they’d want to keep up with mine?”

In fact, if I were to list all the things I’ve thought about and prayed about, things I’m concerned about, dreams I’ve dreamed, grief and sorrow I’ve felt – just this morning, no blog could contain them. However, probably because of my personality and perhaps because of my age, I just don’t care to write them down. I don’t seem to have the blogger mentality. Who knows, maybe this is my breakout moment!

However I do know of some thoughts worth hearing:

How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
They would outnumber the grains of sand. (Psalm 139:17-18)

And it occurred to me this morning, as I was trying to fulfill my blogging duty, that if we were to blog the love of God, it would be kind of like this:

Could we with ink the ocean fill,

And were the skies of parchment made,

Were every stalk on earth a quill,

And every man a scribe by trade,

To write the love of God above,

Would drain the ocean dry.

Nor could the scroll contain the whole,

Though stretched from sky to sky.

From The Love of God, by Fredrick M. Lehman