Thanks for Reading!

Thanks for Reading!

I have been writing a blog since 2009.  My original idea was that it would be a creative outlet and help me articulate some of my thoughts and feelings about being a pastor.  I wrote about all sorts of thing.  Topics might have been something serious like how it feels when church folks tell you they are “going to try out the church down the road,” or something as mundane as my filing system or library organization.  I wasn’t really expecting internet notoriety, and, sure enough, I didn’t get it.  

That changed in 2016. I had been diagnosed with Corticobasal Degeneration (CBD) in 2015 and wanted to do something different with my blog. I started writing about my experiences with CBD.  This was to give my friends all the information they might want to hear about my condition.  I also found it therapeutic to just put down in words how I was feeling.  

I have been a pastor all of my adult life.  That has meant that a good deal of time has been spent communicating.  I typically preached three times a week and also taught an adult Sunday School class.  Anyone who knows what pastors do will also think about the amount of one-on-one conversation a faithful pastor has with his flock.  Now, with CBD to contend with, there has been a radical shift.  I had to resign from the church I had served for 21 years because I could no longer fulfill my responsibilities.  It was just too much.  As my symptoms progressed it became unsafe to drive, and so I became dependent on others to go anywhere, assuming I had the energy to do so.  At about the same time that I gave up driving, it seemed like my voice became markedly worse.  The speech pathologist at Mayo Clinic had diagnosed me with “mild to moderate dysarthria” in the Fall of 2015.  I am confident that the word “mild” and possibly even “moderate” would have been dropped by 2017.  I was able to fill the pulpit of a number of churches after my resignation, but as my voice began to fail me, I preached less and less.  I often did not feel equal to the task and feared my voice would fail mid-sermon.  More importantly, I have always felt that preaching is supposed to be about God, not about His messenger.  Ever since I broke my hip in 2017, I have had to sit on a stool to preach.  Combine that with an unpredictable, sometimes hard to understand voice and I felt as though I was drawing too much attention to myself when preaching.  The bottom line for me is that my “communicating,” whether through preaching or personal interaction, has definitely diminished.

All of this has made me turn, with renewed interest, to my blog.  It is a way to speak.  As I noted earlier, I did not begin to blog anticipating there would be much of an audience, but that has begun to change with my entries about my CBD journey. No, I am still not an internet sensation, and never will be, but I do see how many times my page has been viewed, and that number has grown.  I advertise my blog posts on Facebook, and I often get positive feedback.  I am particularly glad when other members of the CBD Facebook group say they are helped by something I have written.

Now, you would think that someone who feels he has a message to share and a means to do it would end up writing some really great blog posts.  I wish I could say that is true of me, but I can’t.  I’m not saying that I don’t feel like all of my blogs have been worth reading, I just can’t predict which ones will grab a reading audience and which ones won’t!  I have written some that I could not read through without crying, and they got 60 or 70 page-views.  Others, which in my humble estimation were not as good, got over 1000 page-views.  It’s a mystery to me.

For 20 years, while I was serving Bethlehem Church, I had a Monday morning radio broadcast called “The Shepherd’s Hour.”  When it was first offered, I was really excited about having a “media ministry.” I knew the station wasn’t exactly a powerhouse, but it did cover the county and large parts of the surrounding counties, so there was a large potential audience.  I anticipated that before too awfully long random strangers would hear me talking somewhere and ask, “Aren’t you that preacher on the radio?”  If you are thinking, “I bet that never happened!” you would be wrong.  In 20 years it happened exactly once!  In spite of reminding friends and neighbors that I was “on the air,” they seemed surprised if the fact got inserted in a later conversation.  In fact, after about three months on the radio I was convinced that no one, other than my mother-in-law, was listening!  Then someone mentioned hearing my Monday morning message and said they appreciated it.  A few others even called the station to express gratitude.  More importantly, there were a few “hard cases” that wouldn’t darken the door of a church on a dare, who told me they were listening!

I guess what I’m saying is that just as I learned there were people listening to my radio program, there are folks reading my blog.  I hope it is doing them good, and just about the time I am convinced no one is reading, I get some appreciative comment or “like.” It seems my “communicating days” are not quite over.  Thanks for reading, I hope it is doing you good.