Some Further Reflection on My Blogging: Time, Energy, and Terminus

Just a small reflection on blogging. It has only been a few days since I closed my blog The Evangelical Calvinist. It just seemed time to do that, as if the ten years I’d been committed to writing that blog had met their fulfillment. There were a variety of reasons that led me to closing it down, one of them was so, ideally, I could focus more of my energies on potentially, and finally, pursuing the ever elusive PhD. But even now as I have mentally come to terms with the closure of my blog, I have at the same time come to the realization that the blog may have well been my terminus. In other words, I am not actually sure, at this point in life, that I have the energy to do what it takes to really do the PhD. You see, blogging is rather informal and simple; as many know. Even if the blog, like mine, was dominated by deeper theologically oriented research themes, no matter; it was just still blogging. It was still just me reading the various theological books that I do; then me taking a stand-out quote from my reading; and offering a meditation on that quote, and my reading in general. That, as many of you know, was the form of my blogging for years upon years; something like the form present in the medieval scholastic method of lectio-meditatio-quaestiones.

So even now, in these early “post” days of ending my Evangelical Calvinist blog, the realization is hitting me that I may well have indeed been operating right at the very edge of what my time and energy allow for; in regard to writing and researching. Blogging may well have been the terminal for me in regard to what I am motivated to do; which is to read and write theology. You see, my problem, currently, is that by way of employment, I work the graveyard shift. For those who know, the graveyard shift does not result in surpluses of energy; indeed, just the inverse. This is the reality I am up against. While I am still motivated by the desire to earn a PhD, the physical realities are such that that motivation is delimited by the greater reality of lack of time and energy. It takes all that I am to simply continuously read through my Bible, read theology books, turn on the computer, and write a blog post (which approx takes no more than an hour or less).

Anyway, I don’t know what this all means; really. I’ll continue to wrestle through all of this, and see where it leads. One thing I do know is that no matter what The Evangelical Calvinist blog needed to come to an end for me. At the very least I need a fresh start, a new vision and project, in regard to my online theological life. If that eventually means the starting of a new blog, down the road, then maybe that’s what it will be. In the mean time, Medium.com will have to suffice.