Perhaps I obtained a xanga site mainly so that I could read, not write.  I have friends and family that have sites, and I trust that I’ll be encouraged, challenged, blessed, saddened, and broken by what I read and meditate on.  I also have obtained a site so that I know how better to pray.  History (e.g., Jim Elliot) as well as the present have shown that most everyone will write things in a journal that they might never express to someone face to face.  I think that this splintering and categorizing of fellowship is a result of the fall, since I think that fellowship has always been meant to be unhindered.  But the reality of the comfortability of personal writing remains.  So, I will read and learn.  I pray that I will find Godwardness and not godlessness in what I read, and that the words of my friends and family will be evidence of the transformation of the Spirit of Christ and not of world-molding.  I’m sure I’ll post my own meditations now and again, but please forgive me if I choose to cut and paste them from my non-xanga journal.

If you pray, I would be blessed if you would pray that my writing on this site would be done out of humility and not out of pride and vain-glory.  Especially in sharing personal thoughts, there is a tendency to focus on oneself and to think and write as if life is a circle beginning and ending with “me” (journals are generally, by nature, in the first person singular).  My conviction is growing firm that my own sharing and communicating of my meditations and experiences (whether in speech or in writing, in person or via a medium) are all for the blessing and profit and encouragement and fellowship of others, and not for the release that I may get from such “venting.”  There is an others-centeredness that ought to dominate everything I do if I choose to be so bold as to call myself a Christian.  I do mean “everything.”  And I do mean “dominate.”  May this site please the Lord, and may He be gracious to us as He grants us the paradoxical blessing of decreasing as He increases.  “Bless the LORD, O my soul” (Psalm 103:1).