The Bald Goat

This is my anti-blog. I have been blogging everyday for the past 38 days and I have hit a wall. Most days I have really enjoyed blogging. I have these thoughts and ideas in my head and I like the fact that I have a place to write them down. I love the fact that there are actually people out there that want to read my quirky ramblings. Thank you all for taking the time to stop by this site. It means a lot me. I try not to care about whether or not someone visits my site, but to be honest, I sometimes check the analytics. I don’t want to care, but I do and I thank you for stopping by.

But today is not one of those days where I am feeling it. I feel as if I am only writing this blog to satisfy some commitment I made to my readers or God or myself. I want to be asleep. There is stuff in my head to blog about, but this week has been so hard I can barely keep my eyes open to type this.

As I write I realize there is something going on here. I wonder how many other things I do in my life that I don’t really care to be doing. Its not like I never what to do these things, but at that moment I am just not there. There are sometimes when I don’t feel like going to church. or doing any of the religious stuff we do. I sometime don’t feel sociable. I don’t feel friendly. Sometimes I don’t want to love my neighbor… whatever that might mean in whatever situation. And on and on…

So why do we do them? I guess there are some things that are important disciplines. These disciplines are not what is important. They are just a means to an end. I love how C.S. Lewis talks about things in his book “Mere Christianity”. He will describe something and then say, but if this idea doesn’t help you then toss it out. I think that sometimes when a discipline does not work it can actually have negative effects. A person who is forced to go to church for years will rebel against the practice when they are able to make their own decisions  and will always struggle to want to go to church. It would be better to toss out the discipline either completely or temporarily rather than have it cause negative effects. 

Other times we are lazy or tired or whatever and don’t push ourselves. We could do the discipline and we might just find that, even though the discipline is not the end result, to push yourself to carry out the discipline can in fact achieve the desired outcome. On these occasions we need to push ourselves and seek encouragement, to complete the discipline and find ourselves in a better place having achieved the desired outcome after all.

So I am writing the anti-blog post because I do not feel it today and so maybe I should just toss this post out and try again tomorrow. Or maybe since I pushed myself to write something I achieved what I had hoped to accomplish without even knowing it…

Lord, this is a place where your wisdom would greatly help. Help me to honor you in the keeping of the disciplines, but let me also know when to stop so I don’t end up with negative attitudes about these disciplines.