Giving this a try...

I never thought that I would have a blog. I'm not the kind of person who likes to write mass e-mails or forward things around and I am notoriously bad at responding promptly to e-mails and letters. I am also a perfectionist. Thus if I did think that a whole bunch of people whom I loved and respected would actually read my postings, I would want them to be as well written as I could make them and I don't have time for that. Yet despite these disclaimers (and I really hate beginning things with disclaimers), I have decided to give blogging a try.

I recently graduated from the University of Portland and have moved to Allendale (a poor neighborhood of Shreveport, LA) as a missionary of The People of Praise. I'm originally from St. Paul, MN. When I said goodbye to all my brothers and sisters in the People of Praise branch in Portland/Vancouver, I knew that I could not e-mail them all to stay in touch, and four years of living in Portland for school has demonstrated how hard it has been to communicate regularly with my Minnesota friends. During college I studied abroad for a semester in Spain and attempted to write mass e-mails but could not keep up such impersonal writing for long. But this year several close friends of mine began blogging and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed reading their posts. They were not at all like mass e-mails and truly helped me know what was going on in their lives. So I've decided to follow their example.

I cannot promise that I will post regularly, but I hope that when I do post, I will be able to capture some of the essence of my life in Allendale. I hope that my postings will be a means of putting my life in common with my friends, making it easier for us to know and love one another. And one of these days its going to sink in that I don't have to write another college English paper and nerd that I am, I will be a little sad about it and in need of a creative outlet. I doubt that my blog will be New Every Morning, but I know that the Lord's kindness is, even though it may be written about in week or month long chunks.