I'm Back

4 comments | Jun 18, 05:04 PM | best-of-earl | by Earl Creps

The automatic counter on my website indicates that I have not blogged in 211 days. Let’s see now…what was going on just seven months ago. Barak and Hillary were still slugging it out in a marathon campaign. Tim Russert was still alive. Gas was, well, cheaper. And Janet and I were newcomers to the church planting life.

So where have I been for the last 211 days? Here’s an overview of what’s been going on in our life/ministry (and a few reasons why blogging went on “hold” for a while):

1. We have been transitioning from our old life of owning a home, having a job with an office, and working with a team to the path of the itinerating church planter. That is, we are now self-employed and are adjusting to everything that means. So far, it feels like a pretty fair percentage of church planter stress has as much to do with self-employment as with planting per se. It is a different world.

2. We have been traveling full-time raising support and searching for the right team members. Our trips have taken us from sea to shining sea, including one 5,000 mile driving odyssey which was wonderful (we got to see the Grand Canyon and that big meteorite crater outside of Flagstaff), but also very tiring and isolating. I found myself at the end of the day lacking the energy to blog. My travels used to offer material for writing virtually every day, what I call “blog gold.” But this new kind of nomadic life is so focused on one thing (standing up the plant) that the raw material just has not been there like it used to be. Also, I hesitated to turn my blog into a continuous infomercial for the Berkeley project. I will have to find a new way to discover gold.

3. We have tried out photo-blogging (phlogging?) as an alternative. Unwilling to completely disconnect from the many friends who have visited this site, I have been posting pictures of our experiences on my Facebook complete with clever captions. Some of these grainy images have drawn comments from those who’ve never been to this site, suggesting that the FB audience, while it overlaps the conventional blog audience, is a whole ‘nother thing. I intend to continue phlogging on FB and using the UFO-sighting-quality photos (at least until I can afford a better phone). This experience has helped me understand some of the reasons why blogging seems to have peaked.

4. I have been writing a new book. Over the Christmas holidays I finished a book on Reverse Mentoring (younger leaders teaching the older) which has already appeared on Amazon and will ship in September. (There’s a pre-publication sale on right now!) Writing this volume for Jossey-Bass/Leadership Network was really fun, but consumed all my non-itinerating time, and left me drained. I just had no words left—hard as that is to believe. The other thing that writing does to you is steal the time you would have spent reading. Now that’s certainly an acceptable trade off, but the amount of blog raw material in your head erodes as a result. By the time Reverse Mentoring was in the can, the last thing I wanted to look at was look at another page of text on a screen, even my own.

In any event, that’s what’s been going on with us. I intend to start blogging regularly, making today day 1 instead of day 211. Thanks to everyone who encouraged me to get back in the game.