Why I'm One of Those Bloggers Now

I’ve toyed around with the idea of starting a blog for some time. Every time I’ve gotten the nerve up, I seem to talk myself out of it.

I use social media for a comedic outlet of sorts. To be honest, I almost take a satiric look at it in general. It’s a funny concept to me. At some point I thought to myself, how many of these 800 FB “friends” actually care what I’m doing? For that matter, how many of these people do I even want to know the details of my life? Furthermore, how many of those “friends” are anything more than “that person I met that one time”? For instance, I am Facebook friends with a girl that I’ve not seen or talked to since the 2^nd grade (1992ish). Thanks to Facebook, I can tell you not only where she lives now and what she does for a living, but also what kind of dog she has and his name…creepy concept.

Then I realized that the only people who would truly care about my day to day living are the people who are already in my life and already know what’s going on with me in the first place. They don’t need a status update to tell them that I’m “super excited about the new episode of The Office tonight.” So, at some point I decided to just start posting the most random thoughts I could think of to my Twitter and Facebook in an attempt to make people laugh.

However, I’ve recently began to think of what a platform we all have to share our thoughts today. At any given moment, most of us have anywhere between 300-1500 people at our disposal on Facebook and Twitter who are reading every random thought we decide to share with them. This is where my conviction set in. If one day the Lord says, “Jeff, I gave you an audience of 950 people willing to read your every thought, everyday. What did you share with them?” I don’t want to have to say, “Well, Lord, I made a bunch posts about funny stuff my dog does and plenty of lame attempts at humor directed towards pop culture…”

So here we are.

Last fall, I shared a few posts with some close friends and family that I had written to simply share my heart in an attempt to encourage them. One of those friends was a man named Neil, who happens to work for WYMT, a local news station in eastern Kentucky. When he asked me to write for the news station’s blog based on 2 quick posts, I was shocked and honored to say the least. He said, “You have a very serious side yet you are a cut-up. Take for instance your “Tackle You” blog. You drove home a very serious point in a somewhat humorous style. Then the “TC and Me” was very serious. The Lord has given you a gift, one in which I believe you can use to reach people through the written word.”

Talk about an encouraging/convicting dagger to the chest. I’ve been running from the idea of blogging for a long time, and I’m afraid that I have decided to finally surrender. Unlike my Twitter and Facebook, I plan for my blog to be much more of a look at what I’m learning, what I see in my world, and what they resonate in my heart. I can’t promise that everything I post will be entertaining, or for that matter worth the time it takes you to read it. But, I can promise that it will be from the heart, intended to be thought provoking if nothing else.

To get started, I will be reposting the 2 posts that Neil mentioned above.

Here goes nothin’…