Reservations

This page is for context and conversation – not publication

I’m probably not the only one to have reservations about publishing what I’ve written — not to mention the multitudes who will have reservations about even reading it. Amongst readers, time seems to be the chief constraint. It’s always remarkable to me how many people land on one of my web pages and go no further. But I won’t take it personally. The internet is obsessed with improving click-through rates, so I’m clearly not the only one suffering from inattention.

Newsprint isn’t much better, but at least it gets recycled after it’s tossed. News publishers, mindful of their readers, and focused one way or another, are necessarily selective in what they print and post. Understood! So I won’t take it ill of them either when any of my stuff gets passed over.

My reservation, generally then, is that I won’t find an audience. I’ve been languishing in the low lands the of the world wide web for a long time already, since 1999 in my first domain, and since 2007 on Facebook, so I have experience. Will anyone get anything out of what I write? Will the small flurry of Facebook referrals from friends peter out as quickly as my Facebook post is buried? And who really cares about me in my small corner anyway?

I do have enough self-confidence (stubbornness?) to persist, patiently. I’ve also inherited my father’s demeanor — satisfied with flitting about like a sparrow rather than soaring like an eagle. I accept that, whatever the gifts given to us by God, they’ve got to be worth something.

There is a bit of the underdog in us too. I wonder what my father would be thinking now if he’d lived another twenty years into this new age of cancel conflicts and organ-less worship. “Keep your head down, jonge! We are yesterday’s people”

I stuck it out a bit when I organized a Jordan Peterson course at church in 2018, but the climate has changed again, and I’m reticent now about re-sharing what I wrote then. When I wrote “God Includes” for church consideration 15 years ago, I did not realize how prescient it would be for countering today’s intersectional, identity politics, but I’m reluctant to wade in there.

Then there’s all the stuff that is outdated. Maybe John Calvin should be kept in his tome. Dealing with the demise of my mother’s stuff is already eight years in the past. Is the age of simple beach-going delight over? Who else but my family cares about Terschelling? And are ancestors twelve generations back of any relevance at all?

Ultimately, such questions are mine alone to answer, just as they are for any author or artist. Considering the vast output of works for public consumption, there is no reason not to participate, no matter how obscurely. That’s just what people do. We leave the blessing to God.