Getting it Write

My father wrote me an email when I told him that I was asked to be the regular preacher at Holy Joy church. In it, he wrote the following:

Dear Rob. 

I think your becoming a preacher is a calling you have had most of your life and I wish you well.  I am still working on my writing, some new stuff and minor corrections on old stuff.  I just got through reading Chapter 25, Who I Am,  A Spiritual Journey.  I go back and read it every once in a while.  Each time I read it makes me think about who I am or at least who I want to be.  

I wonder if something like that might be something you need to write for yourself, to help you remember who you are when you get stuck at times.  Doing two jobs at a time is often hard to keep track of who you really are.

That is something to consider. Who you are is so tied up in what you spend time on, and most of us spend most of our waking time at work. What happens when you add another job that is significantly different from your main job? How does that change who you are, what you do, and what you want to be?

One thing I did during this last trip to Kansas (January/February 2026) was browse through some of my old journals. I read through quite a few entries from the first one, which covered most of my college years. There were things that made me cringe, and things that made me nod in recognition. My reasons for journaling were mostly to preserve my thoughts. I even made a short list, including my grandfather who had recently passed away, a girl who I had been infatuated with (just her name, nothing for me to actually connect with, and true to the prediction I do not remember anything about her at all!), a couple of classes that I have memories of, and Monty Python for crying out loud! The British comedy troupe managed to occupy far more of my mental state than I am willing to admit at this point.

What I didn't realize when I started was that the very act of writing down my thoughts was helping me to think. I am hardly unique in this, and probably started to understand it after reading it from someone else. Maybe one of the sources quoted in this article from Quote Investigator. 

I like to think of myself as a thoughtful, intelligent person. Who doesn't? But I am not fast on my feet conversationally. Taking in a new idea as I hear it is slow for me, and my response is either fast or thoughtful. Not both.

Part of what you see in the Roblog is me thinking slowly. Sometimes really slowly, sometimes not slowly enough. I started writing this post in February of 2026, just for the record. I will leave it to you to decide whether I wrote it slowly enough.

Part of my job is counseling students at my university. Sometimes this means listening to them talk about something that they think will impress me, or asking me questions that they think will impress me. But sometimes they ask for advice, which scares me just a little. I try to avoid saying, "You should..." with one exception, and even that adds a maybe:

Maybe you should try writing about this in a journal. Write down the question you just asked me, then write out an answer, and what that answer means, and what it would lead to. Then explore another answer to the question. You will find that some of your ideas seem to become more solid as you write them down, and some get fuzzier and fuzzier, until all that you have left is a blurry smudge of ink where you thought you had an idea. If it's a really tough one, you might have to write out some ideas them leave them alone for a few days, because even the good ideas look fuzzy when you stare at them too long. 

I both love and fear this process. I love it because sometimes an idea comes out so clear and beautiful that I can't quite believe that it is really mine. I fear it because sometimes my ideas rise up like the Urak-hai out of Saruman's mud pits in Lord of the Rings. Ugly grains of truth twisted by selfishness or pride. And totally mine. And what if I mistake the wrong for the right just because it is mine, and pleasing to me? What if I take one of these deceptive ideas into the nest of my mind, feed it and care for it until it grows into a belief, spawning habits and attitudes like a cuckoo that came out of my own self? What then?

The good writers know that you must kill your darlings. No matter how well something is written, if it does not serve the purpose of your piece, it has to be cut. This has always been hard for me, because these darling ideas are sometimes very difficult to bring into being. It has gotten easier in some ways, harder in others.

I have been preaching semi-full-time at Holy Joy for a year now. Thirteen and a half months on the calendar, but six weeks in America during the winter makes it roughly a year. Three sermons a month, so right around 40 sermons. An auspicious number, even if that is not the exact count. At any rate, it is more than the 30-something sermons I wrote between 2017 and June of 2025.

I have also been writing content for the courses I've been teaching. A lecture and a sermon are qualitatively different, but one similarity is that there is a deliberate audience. In short, I've been sharpening my thinking for other people to hear my ideas. It's meant that the Roblog has been sadly neglected. I started writing this post on February 20th, 2026. If I hit publish today, it will be August 15th. 

So here is part of the answer to the question: Who am I? I'm someone who writes to get it right.