Sunday Sermon

Blogger ate my post.

I worked on it for about 45 minutes, adding pictures and linking various bits of text to web pages, then I hit "Publish Post." After 5 seconds or so, I got the dreaded "cannot open page" message. I hit the back arrow, hoping to recover the post - nothing. I tried all of the tricks that 400+ posts have taught me about the ins and out of Blogger, but it was no use; those 1200 words are lost to the ether, never to be found again.

I could recreate the post. I have most of the pics on hand and the webpages are in my history file, but I have discovered in myself an odd resistance to doing that. It's not the wasted time; I have no other pressing time constraints at the moment. It's not that I'm angry about losing it; I was a bit pissed off for a few minutes, but what's done is done. It's just GONE.

I had a pressing topic to talk about - getting prepared for the coming Winter. I've got great plans to overcome the raging hate-on I have for the cold, dark months, and I explained them fully in the post. I even couched it all in a metaphor, equating my struggle with Winter to warfare (hey, if Bush can declare war on an abstract concept like terror, I can declare war on a season...).

But now that it has been lost, I feel no drive to redo it. I think I have finally glimpsed that state of writing nirvana in which the audience is of no consequence to the writer. I wrote it, and it was good. Only I know that it was good, and in this particular case, that is all that matters.

I suppose that it must not be all that good, or I'd be dying for someone to read it and congratulate me, but it honestly feels like I don't need to rebuild it because it was good enough for me. I needed to write it, but I don't need you to read it. The writing was enough - the doing was enough.

So there is your sermon topic. Examine the things that you work at, and ask yourself if you'd still do them if there was no audience. With no one to see and judge your work, how would you do things differently? And once you think that over for a bit, ask yourself why you care about audience in the first place. It may uncover some things about your motivations that you never noticed before...

Go in Peace.