I'm not a fan of blogs being used for personal/confessional writing: at best, it can come across as forced and unsettling; at worst, it's an inappropriate medium for telling people what they should know already if they actually care about you as a person.
Of course, like all human axioms this is made to be broken - anyone who has ever spent five minutes on the excellent
PostSecret will know that such things can not only be therapeutic for a reader, but also must be immensely enlightening for those who anonymously 'confess'. I never intended, in terms of blogging, to pitch my writing anywhere other than somewhere between commentator, informer, and secondary source. Whilst I do write regularly about personal activity - focusing, obviously, on endeavours underneath the loose mediatree banner - I'm generally quite careful, in the style of the best new media practitioners which I observe and aspire to emulate, to keep 'real life' something which remains offline.
However, as one begins to effect the other, I have found in the past few months that such lines have become blurred. In an attempt to therefore comment on 'real life' without going as far as to 'spill completely' (a term concocted once at a funeral, as it seemed a very appropriate one for many things at the time), as I maintain that open writing is not really an appropriate forum.
Allow me, therefore, to make the following comments and observations. Having read the above by way of disclaimer, you've been warned.
[1] Shortly before Christmas, a friend passed away suddenly. It was weird, and I still struggle to put the experience into words - I recommend to you instead the reactions David Crowder relates in his excellent cowritten book,
Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven (But Nobody Wants To Die).
It was weird for many reasons, but one I can actually articulate is this: she wasn't a friend I spoke to every day, hell every week; instead, there were two or three intense periods each year when I would hope to be brainstorming and writing, and then actually enacting youth work with her. Aside from that, I would have contacted her randomly, usually either in relation to a shared love of folk music (upon which I was consistently being told off and educated) or every time anything (and I mean
anything relating to
The West Wing came up. (For example, Richard Schiff was once playing in a celebrity golf tournament. My immediate reaction was to fire off a message akin to, "
Toby's playing golf on ITV!' I recall the reply being something like, 'I literally just screamed at dad that I had to tell you about that...'
There was, and still is, a huge outpouring of grief because she was someone who affected so many in such a variety of ways. When she was alive, I would probably not have said we were tightly close; but since her death, I have been repeatedly reminded and told otherwise. Certainly, there is a huge area of life which is still very stained (in the good way, for the few who were in Kilbroney yesterday) by her joyful memory.
[2] It has slowly dawned on me that I was more financially free as a student than I am now. This mightn't sound like much; in fact, more often than not I take a little kick from realising that I don't care for finance much beyond getting by. However, after nearly twelve months of doing just that - barely scraping by - I'm finding it's getting very old. Although there is no immediate solution to this, the frustration continues to grow. Because of the nature of the media work I do, so much of it is goodwill - and either way, what financial payment does turn up is always reasonable but far from sustaining. As for 'real life' - I got very sick of job interviews for things that always seemed
just out of reach (knowingly coming second, it turns out, does hurt more than it is cool), began temping, and am still at least a few months away from escaping that.
I know where I want to go in life and to where I feel called, and it's my responsibility to make sure I do everything I can to get there. But it's hard, isn't it?
[3] I was 'home' today doing a bit of gardening - original home, not current home, as it were. It is a very sad thing when you realise that home is no longer where you have lived the longest.
[4] God doesn't cause suffering; and in fact, we are never tested by pain and sin beyond what we can bear, as the text says. But, as Job found, pain does go right up to the line. There have been a few occasions in the past when I have found this; sadly, another one is currently in progress. I don't ask for sympathy, but learning. I've also found the current sermon series by the calmer-and-less-divisive-than-he-apparently-used-to-be Mark Driscoll (of the other Mars Hill Church), entitled
Trial to be amazing and appropriate. I would heavily recommend the whole lot to anyone with a soul, but men in particular, as it is to men that Driscoll would seem at his best when addressing.
[5] I feel like I've written my best music over the last 12-18 months; I don't mean that to sound big-headed. But people responded well in the past, and there's been excellent feedback since. In no way, shape or form can I afford to record or gig them, in terms of money or time. And I hate it as much, in most cases more, than anything else mentioned in this article.
That's all - back to YouTube videos next time, I promise!
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Just caught this report on BBC News, so have found the web report on it; the National Secular Society, a pressure group representing non-believers (which is not an issue in itself - I mean, someone gave Mary Whitehouse a voice, and we've all been paying for it since) are calling for churches to foot the bill for hospital chaplains. Here's a key paragraph:
