When I starting blogging a year ago, I didn’t expect to earn a penny at it. I just started writing and didn’t stop.
A friend who has written nine books told me that seven of them are out of print. No one is reading them at all. They sit on shelves gathering dust, with the words locked inside their covers. His blog, on the other hand, is always alive and active. Posts he’d written a decade ago are constantly being rediscovered and reread by new audiences around the world.
Real writers don’t just write for self-expression. Real writers write to be read. Engagement with an audience is as important as verbally externalizing our internal thoughts and feelings.
And it so disturbed my friend that the words he’d written to be shared weren’t being read by anyone that he encouraged me to focus more on blogging than on book-writing. I do hope to publish the several book manuscripts I am close to completing, but I took my friend’s words to heart and have been writing about four times a week for the last year. And you readers have been so incredible in not just reading what I’ve written, but in engaging with me and the thoughts and stories I’ve shared.
I’ve discovered that blogging is exactly the kind of writing I like best. But could I make a living doing it?
Well, a few weeks ago I had a conversation with someone I have respected from a distance for years, and she hired me on a very part-time level to continue doing what I’ve been doing here but on a larger scale. So, what I’m doing is gathering together a collection of 40-50 like-minded writers to form a much larger blog where we write about engaging with God in the ordinary details of our lives. Eventually, we hope to add podcasts and host live video conversations about faith in the everyday. The goal being to have a robust conversation that is both theological and practical.
I’ll continue writing this blog. I’ve been in conversations about making this blog more robust as well. So, stay tuned! I’ll be announcing details about the collection blog and the enhancements to this one in the next few weeks.
After 30 years of writing, both as a journalist and as a pastor, this has been the best year of writing in my life. And I have you and your engagement with me over the year to thank for that — you and the Lord who inspires almost everything I write.