This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.

If you are married, on your wedding day you made a vow where you pledged your “faith, each to the other.”

But what is faithfulness in marriage?

Most people say faithfulness means not having sexual or emotional intimacy with anyone besides your spouse. And certainly that is a critical part of faithfulness. 

But, believe it or not, it’s not the most important part.

Above all, being faithful to your spouse means that even when they have angered you or hurt your feelings, you refuse to believe they are a bad person. You “keep faith” in them.

I maintain faith in my wife by remembering who she is, that I love and care for her, and that she loves me too. And if I remember she loves me, I know she would never purposely do anything to hurt me.

This means no matter how hurt or upset I may be, I cling stubbornly to my belief that my wife is a great person. I refuse to allow my negative feelings to lead me to think she’s *trying* to hurt me, or that she’s intentionally setting me up to lose an argument or to look or feel like an idiot.

It sure can feel like it sometimes though, can’t it? In certain seasons of marriage, it can sometimes feel like you’re butting heads constantly. After a while you can easily start making highly toxic assumptions about your spouse:

• He must not really love me
• She loves it when I look stupid
• He doesn’t even want to talk to me
• She’s not even trying
• How could he/she do this to me?
• I’ve been a fool all along thinking they were going to come through

When you allow yourself to believe any of these things about your partner, you have gone from thinking they may have said or done a bad thing to believing they are a bad person, that their desire is to do you harm.

This is why it is so important to marry a good human being, one in whom your faith can be reasonably placed. Because if you are certain your spouse has ill will toward you, then only one of two things is possible. Either you are mistaken, or you married a jerk.* 

This happens of course. Good people marry jerks all the time. And jerks marry other jerks. If you are engaged, and you are not absolutely certain that your partner is a deeply good human being who desires good things for you, turn around and run! And don’t stop until you fall into the arms of such a person.

Sometimes your spouse will lose faith in themselves. 

They will have times where they aren’t sure if they are a good person. 

When this happens, your job is to simply tell them what you know and have always known — that they are good, even if sometimes they don’t talk or act or feel like it. And their job is to do that for you.

But neither of you can do your job if you lose faith in one another, if you stop believing in each other’s good intentions.

So beyond sex, have you been faithful to your spouse? Or when things get tense, do you quickly start thinking they don’t care, and assuming bad things about them?

Keep the faith. The more you believe in your spouse’s goodness, the more you will see it in them.

*[Jerks are people too. You can care for them and have compassion for them. But you do not have to allow them into your life to spread their chaos.]

I got old on Thursday.

Not last Thursday.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t a Thursday. I don’t remember, I’m old now.

But it happened that way.

In a moment. An instant.

I was getting in my car to go to work. As I often do, I connected my phone to listen to my precious music on the way.

The music filled the car. And it was fine at first.

But then it wasn’t.

I don’t mean the music. I mean the moment.

Suddenly, in that moment, the music seemed old.

I should mention that it was. 35 years or so.

It had just never sounded old to me before.
It was the music I had fallen in love with in middle school (that’s what we old folks used to call “Jr. High School,” kids).

Played on the cassette player in my first car. [See, there were these cassette tapes, and sometimes something would get mucked up and tape guts would get into your player and cause a ton of headache. You might have to get tweezers and carefully pull the guts out of your machine, stick your finger in one of the tape spools, and manually rewind the tape a little and hope it would still play and preferably not spill its guts all over your tape deck again. (We called ’em “tape decks.”)]

The music that had faithfully shepherded me through adolence, college, my first years of marriage, graduate school, raising my three babies.

It soothed, comforted, and empowered me through hours and days in my room, as I lay in bed on occasions where I could do little else but listen, praying that the MS ravaging my body would relent and leave me with any of my faculties intact. Or at least that I’d have the energy to get up and not let The Simpsons Movie play for a fourth time in the DVD player. (Remember those?)

I don’t need to explain. You have a soundtrack to your life too. And you know what it means to you.

So I knew my music was old.

But that day, all at once, it sounded its age. And at that moment, for the first time in my life, I felt my own.

Which is to say I experienced myself as the person I saw people my age as being when I was young, when that music — and everything else in the world — was new.

And it scared me. How the days are flying, how quickly I’ll be looking far into the past as I re-read this post and reflect on this moment. How I won’t actually be able to read this post at all because I won’t remember where I left my glasses.

Our girls are gone and our house is so often empty.

I’ve lost my hair and my beard is turning gray.

The lines on my face (and the hair in my ears — what?) surprise me every morning.

And for the first time in my life, I’m beginning to hear it, a ruthless hum of dread. It’s faint, but it daily grows a tiny bit louder.

The End.

Seriously, I’m done writing now. I haven’t resolved this yet. I haven’t wrapped it all up neatly into an object lesson as I am wont to do. (I’m getting older, so I say things like, “as I am wont to do”). I’m sure one day I’ll write about all the amazing wisdom I gained at this time in my life. Because I am wont to do that.

But right now, to be honest, I’m a little scared. Not of dying but of getting older. And of living to an age where I say things like, “I hope I live until next week because the new Wonder Woman movie comes out Friday.”

After all this is brand new to me, on account of having just gotten old on Thursday.

When someone makes a mistake, then apologizes for it, as far as I’m concerned, it’s done. Chances are usually that I wasn’t angry to begin with, but if I was, a sincere apology does a lot to resolve my anger and any hurt feelings I may have had. I went into the ministry and into counseling (and onto social media) assuming most people were the same way.

I was wrong. Though a good apology goes a long way for some, it seems to have almost zero effect on others.

Even after 20 years of ministry, a decade on social media, and teaching and counseling for two decades, I am still often shocked and saddened with how graceless people often are.

I apologize if this sounds like I’m elevating myself above anyone else. That isn’t my intent. I don’t take any credit for the fact that I forgive easily. It’s just the way I am. I suppose I could just have easily been wired like one of those who struggle to forgive, and I have to remind myself of that constantly.

But on a psychological level, what’s going on with people who can listen to a heartfelt apology and still respond with bitterness, or as if an apology had never been offered at all? How many times must they  have been abused or betrayed? How jaded and cynical must they have grown somehow, and through what kinds of horrible circumstances? How many years must they have spent defending their own rightness and goodness, convincing themselves of their own invulnerability to mistakes, foolery, and hurtfulness to others?

Continue reading “Absence of Grace”