My first blog

Why blog?

I am of a generation that is either very technological astute or very outside the loop.  I remember the first Mac, representing the first “personal computer” that I ever saw.  The library at Ken Caryl Jr High purchased one and the librarian chose two of my friends to learn how to use it.  They spent hours messing around with it.  For my part, I wasn’t invited to play and grew to really resent that machine that kept my friends away from me.  

The first time I remember e-mail was in 1995.  I came back to the seminary from internship and in one year it seemed like the computers had taken over.  There was a huge lab and we all had assigned e-mail addresses.  Suddenly I was doing my final year’s papers on them instead of the faithful old IBM Selectric typewriter that I learned to type on.  

After seminary, I wound up in a church and received my first lap top.  Wow.  Being able to take my type writer anywhere!  Oh, the freedom!  Oh, the joy!  But I became attached and even though I never used any program except e-mail and whatever word processing program it came with, I was hooked.  The next step was assembling a group of guys and commissioning them to build a network for the church.  Then came a website and well, the rest, as they say, is history.

What about the application of technology beyond e-mail and typing?  Well, I wrote daily devotions and sent them via e-mail but that was about the extent of it.  And so it remained for the last 12 years or so.  Until...

Last year I bought a Mac and one day at the Apple Store changed my life.  Suddenly, I was equipped to make my own website, my own blog, my own anything.  I know how to do things I never knew I wanted to do.  Wow.  It’s a bizarrely integrated world out there with my personal website being linked to my Facebook page linked to my blog and my whole photo gallery on line too.  But the blog still seemed a strange thing to me.  Who would ever want to read my musings?  Well, I suppose it’s a bit of a chance but after a year of thinking about it, I’m ready.  Hopefully, there will be an audience.  But it seems like the right (“write?”) thing to do.  We come from a proud theological tradition of using the latest technology to promote the Gospel, so, here it goes.  Prepare yourself for musings that you won’t hear in sermons, for additional information, for questions and answers, for totally random thoughts, and for explanations of methodologies and policies.  Here it goes.  Lord save us.  My blog story begins and ends with Apple.  God’s story with us begins in Genesis with forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and ends in Revelation with the fruit of the Tree of Life being the healing of the world.  How’s that for coincidence?