BitterSweetLife

To a More Serious & Wild BitterSweetLife

About three years ago, this blog came into the world at an inauspicious computer terminal in a public library. Like many newborns, the blog began its life in a meandering, Thoreau-like fashion, posting nature photographs and musing about caterpillars. In its adolescent year, the blog flirted briefly and flippantly with pop culture (it meant nothing!) before deliberately incorporating some of the elements so ingrained in BitterSweetLife's current ethos: coffee, hoops, and a somewhat creative, experimental way of talking about unchanging, non-negotiable theology.

And so we arrive at birthday number three, and find a blog somewhat tested by time, a blog somewhat seasoned, a blog somewhat changed from what early subscribers knew, but only more sure of what it thinks is true.

Bittersweetness has been a constant thread over the last three years. Sometimes it was reveled in more consciously, thus appearing with greater hit-you-over-the-head obviousness. (If you're relatively new to the blog, you might want to check these classics: Bittersweet What? The Bittersweet Life Unpackaged The Terms of Bittersweetness) But it was always there.

At defining moments like this, it's typical to look back over your shoulder and reflect, and this is especially true when you're dealing in blog years, which count for about a dozen human ones. So then: blogging consistently for three years has not been easy. Some weeks I've had to discipline myself just to write something. Other times I've had to resist the temptation to stay up until 3 a.m. writing the Great American Blog Post. Then there's the times I've had to buy off Lindsay with chocolate and flowers just so she would let me blog that week. But this kind of thing is secondary.

Mostly, I want to write about Jesus and his Father and the Holy Spirit, and how they have changed the world and are still changing it. This is something I often struggle to do, and as a pastime, it's become more serious and more wild over the last three years.

More serious: because we're all struggling, fighting to the death, to live out our relationship to Jesus with endurance and poise. If we know him, this means believing in him even when it seems that he has pitted the entire shape of our past and future lives against us for purposes of sanctification. If we don't know him, this means trying to consistently live as if death is simply the end of a long, complicated chemical reaction and "love" and "tragedy" are small side effects that happen at various points in the sequence. Either way, it's serious.

More wild: because the more I think about God and repeatedly beg him to give me a look at his glory, even if it's in a rear view mirror, the more I realize that looking at God would be like trying to see the Atlantic through a pinhole. Jesus, the Father, the Spirit--they're a mountain range that dwarfs the universe. This world is a pebble on the way to the trailhead. Yes, God be praised, he's given us the Bible, so we know enough about his character and his ways to fall on our faces and worship. But even so, anything we can say about him will have a cursory, half-cocked feel to it. Our words will catch mere bits and pieces of his perfection. So I think that at the best of times, it takes a courageous wildness to attempt to say things about God, and I'm trying to cultivate that.

Where does this leave the blog? More free and more deliberate, I hope. Sometimes, in a tribute to God's fierce and uncivilized glory, I would like to rip off paragraph-long posts and slap them up without any feelings of guilt. And sometimes, in recognition of the crushing weightiness of God's perfection, I would like to craft painstaking pieces that glisten with intent, they have been so carefully polished. God needs slapdash sentences and premeditated prose, both. I'm trying to learn, because I want to point people to him. And so, all this with his help. Here's the year number four.