Why am I doing this?

I’m writing this as a web serial. I’ve read some pretty interesting serial stories, and I think the format lends itself well to some situations. If you’re not aware, a “serial” is a story or series that is published one chapter at a time. The great Alexander Dumas published all of his Three Musketeers stories as series, as well as The Count of Monte Cristo. In his day and age, his writings were much more consumable if the reader could buy one chapter at a time, each week, possibly along with the rest of the newspaper.

In our day, the popular formats for idea consumption are all online. You don’t find a lot of articles that take more than 10 minutes to read. Many platforms are geared towards shorter form content. Twitter is the king of short form content, where they limited messages to 144 characters for many years. Most video platforms (especially YouTube) now focus on Shorts (videos of one minute or less) if you want to increase your viewership. TikTok may not have invented anything new, but they seem to have perfected the platform for people with short attention spans.

When I was a kid and we first got a cable TV package, we suddenly went from the standard six to ten channels, to a whopping 40 channels. With that change, “channel surfing” became a thing. We would sit down to spend time watching TV, without any particular idea of what TV program/show we wanted to watch. So you pick up the remote and start flipping through channels. You would spend a few seconds on each station to decide if you wanted to spend more time on that station. This was an existing cultural phenomenon that was new to my house. I look back now and can clearly see that when you have an audience of channel surfers, the TV producers and ad producers have to make things more flashy and more enticing, if you want to get people’s attention.

And so, in my time writing this serial, I’m taking a little bit of influence from popular culture. My articles here, which I imagine will some day be bound together into an omnibus volume (which we still today call a “book” 😉), will be more of the short form. There will be links from one to another. As any web marketing person will tell you: any good advertisement needs a call to action. My calls to action will always be twofold: first, to make your life better and second, to move on to the next article.

I imagine that my main audience here is full of people who have a desire to be better than they are now, but who don’t know how to do that. You are working jobs each day, providing for your families, or you might do a lot of work that doesn’t pay (like a housewife or a caretaker for elderly parents). You spend your time mainly in doing things. You probably do take some time to yourself every once in a while to recharge. It might just be an hour or two, or that rare, but needed, vacation. But mostly, you’re actually trying to make a difference. I’m here to give you ideas on how you can do that. And by the way, that paragraph described me as well. So I guess I’m also writing this to myself.

I’m often going to drop into a mode of speaking where I only point vaguely at the true answer. This is to help people digest things. If I were to say, “the answer is Jesus,” then many people (possibly even myself), would dismiss what I’m saying. Because Jesus isn’t here looking over my shoulder. He isn’t sitting next to me each day as I work a boring job. He isn’t helping me to make dinner as I scramble to try to feed everyone on time. He isn’t driving my kids to their next activity so that I can work on laundry. Since we don’t see Jesus every day doing each of these mundane things, then we often forget that in reality, he is actually there in each of those cases. But I’m not here to just reinforce the fact that Jesus is watching everything you do. That only leads to paranoia if you happen to remember it in random moments throughout the day. Instead, I’ve learned to use different words and concepts to get the effect that I’m looking for. And those different words and concepts turn out to be more useful for me, while only pointing in the general direction of the true answer.

Let me give you an example. If someone from work were to ask me what is most important in life, then I would usually respond along the lines of “improvement is most important.” I would then explain that if we’re never improving then we’re stagnant. You can’t ever be perfect or the best, but you can always be better. Just yesterday (as I’m writing this), my son was trying to bake some sourdough bread. This is the first time he has tried to do that. It’s quite the family project to get sourdough starter, make the sourdough culture, feed it for days on end, and then eventually get to make something with it. And we’re learning all of this from books and videos and a little bit of help over the phone from my mother in law who lives 800 miles away.

As we were trying to stretch the dough so we could then shape a loaf to bake, the dough was a lot stickier than our books said it should be. My son was trying his best, but he really has only baked bread a couple of times in his life, and he had never baked sourdough. And with all of that limited experience to draw upon, this dough wasn’t cooperating. It was all over his hands and generally making a mess of the counter. It was lumpy and also had some holes in it. It was so frustrating that he started to cry. Now in that moment, it would have been next to useless for me to say “It’s not worth crying over, because Jesus is watching.” Even if I was a bit stronger (and arguably more accurate) and said “It’s not worth crying over, because Jesus is helping,” then he would not have been consoled. He probably would have been skeptical and doubting. “How could this bread be such a mess if Jesus, the only perfect person to live on the earth, was helping me to make it?” And I wouldn’t blame him for feeling that way.

Instead, I talked to him about how experience is necessary for everything. I told him about failed cooking projects that I had done. My favorite is when I tried to make sugar free peanut brittle for a friend who was diabetic. All I did was make peanut brittle but without adding any of the sugar. I didn’t substitute in anything else, so it was like making cornbread with no corn. It was a complete mess and inedible, and I was devastated at the time. I told him about how easy it is to walk, and how babies somehow aren’t smart enough to do even that (he recognized the playful sarcasm in my voice at that example). I even pointed out to him that lifting your head up must be the easiest thing in the world, but new born babies take weeks to learn to do that effectively. Those examples were much more helpful to him than if I were to point directly to the answer and say “It’s okay if you’re struggling with this, because struggling helps us grow closer to Jesus.”

So you’re going to get these articles in bits and pieces. And sometimes one topic is going to be broken up into multiple sections. I generally think that long form essays allow you to be more expressive and comprehensive, but I also recognize that even I (maybe especially I) have a limit to my attention span.

I do hope that you enjoy this format. I genuinely want to bring people to Christ, and make your life better by doing so. I draw closer to Christ because I know that my life is (and my next life will be) so much better when I do. I want you to experience the same.

To end this section, I’m going to awkwardly start a thing that will be much more useful later. I’m going to point you to new articles (which I haven’t written yet), that will be good threads to read down. So this paragraph is a placeholder, to be replaced at some point in the near future, when I have more things written, and can tell you what you might want to read next.