This week I am celebrating the first month of going live with this wacky idea of a Shrinking the Camel Blog. Of course it has been a wonderful creative outlet to express my irreverent thoughts on the spiritual lessons found in business and career life, and to meet other bloggers, too. By the way, where did all you people come from!? I was surprised how quickly the traffic started up, thanks to some early links and support from people like Red Letter Believers and 24/7 Faith (thanks, guys!), along with encouragement from uber-blogger Marcus Goodyear (who seems to be everywhere! How does he do it?) of HighCalling.org.
What I didn’t expect was the tremendous level of self-consciousness that would accompany the blogging. Does that happen to everyone? Maybe that’s just part of the blog-experience orientation, but after my first few postings I would obsess about it: Will people come back to read the next entry? Will they like me? Will they think it’s a waste of words? Do they think I’m too old for this? Am I too fat? Am I offending someone? Am I just another lame blogger clogging up the blogosphere?
“But this blogging thing is just a sideline!” I try to tell myself. “A hobby! Who cares what people think!”
After some initial hand wringing, I decided to seek advice on blog-etiquette to make sure I didn’t come off like a complete ass, and so that I wasn’t alienating the very people I wanted to draw in. The blog-advice article I consulted said “keep your audience in mind when you write.” Well, duh. This obviously should be the very thing that slants my writing, my target market, and my outreach to fellow bloggers.
Hmm. Good question. So, who exactly is my audience?
- Is it middle-aged business executives looking for some spiritual meaning in their lives?
- Is it young up-and-coming ambitious men and women looking for spiritual support as they navigate their careers?
- Is it cynical-smart Christians who want a break from the all of the super-sanitized over-spiritualized writing going on out there?
- Is it faith-in-the-workplace ministry workers who want to network with others who share their interest?
I don’t think I know yet who this audience is going to be. Perhaps the audience I am thinking of isn’t even interested in blogging. Maybe it’s too early to tell.
Maybe you have a better idea than I do.
In the meantime, I made a promise to myself that I would follow the advice of one of my heroes, the venerable C.S. Lewis, who said:
“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
The bottom line in all of this for me and this blog is its originality. So that’s what I will do. Tell the truth. My truth. I don’t have any profound spiritual answers, really. Let’s get that on the table right now. You won’t be getting from me the six steps to this or the seven solutions for that. Just the raw truth of my own life, and how I am working to integrate my spiritual, business, family and community life together. It’s not easy.
So, my dear new friends and blog-readers, I promise to be real, to be honest, and never, ever to pretend that I am more spiritual than you. Because I most certainly am not. I’m just an ordinary guy living in the midst of this ongoing tension, trying to figure it out.
Without sounding like a religious bone-head.
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