MarshallSherman.com

I tried to understand blogging.

I really did. I mean, I started back at 14 with Advancing His Kingdom (which was eventually hosted by WordPress) and was a part of the original Rebelutionaries group when Alex and Brett first started the Rebelution. It just seems like when I try to blog, my thoughts never come out very clearly.

It’s not that I don’t know how to communicate. I spent several years traveling the country and teaching people how to communicate effectively. I’ve been to 47 of the 48 contiguous US States – and conducted conferences in many of them teaching students and teachers alike the importance of communication, and critical thinking and then coaching them on how to do it effectively.

Of course, as my good friend and fellow intern Justin Louis jokingly pointed out, that doesn’t make us good at it. “We’re not experts at communication, we just teach it.”

But I was even good at it. Any time I would speak or teach I would have someone come up to me afterwards and tell me how amazing it was, or how informative it was, how I was not boring to listen to and I communicated so well. I’m not being facetious of exaggerating when I say that I literally cannot count the number of times I had someone come up to me and say, “God is going to use your words.” or “You speak with such authority.”. I’ll never forget at the end of one of the conferences I had a mom come up to me and say, “Thank you so much. My son was pitching a fit about coming this weekend, but after attending one of your classes/workshops he came home fired up and can’t wait to start developing opportunities to speak in his community!”

You’d think some of that communication “ability” would translate into at least a little bit of an ability to blog. Or write.

Apparently, you’d be wrong.

So, that got me thinking (I taught critical thinking, too, remember?). Why the tar can I not write a blog post people want to read? I started researching blogging. I started reading more blogs. I started going back over all the old ones I’d written, and after sifting through the insecure, and immature rhetoric of a 14/15/16 year old with a desire to do something greater with his life than have sex with girls, drink alcohol behind the backs of authorities, or “experiment” with different types of “substances” — I think I figured out what it was.

I was trying too hard.

I made the mistake that a lot of eager, driven, ambitious people do (not just teenagers): I tried to force revelation. I tried to write about things, I didn’t really know about, or had only read about, and I wrote about them as if I knew or had experienced them. I hadn’t lived through that part of life and I was reaching really hard to act as if I had, and that I knew the right way to handle it. That was an interesting discovery for me, because I realized that I actually might have been doing that in my everyday life at that point as well. Shocker, I know!

I think part of it was that I tried to write as if I were thinking things I wasn’t. I knew I didn’t want to write about the same things that most teenagers did on their Xangas, or Myspace’s, or blogs. They were pretty much the equivalent to, as Alex and Brett so aptly put it, “locker room walls or perfumed diaries”. They were simply writing out their thoughts. But honestly, that’s really all blogging is. Rather than write something I wasn’t thinking, what I needed to do was change what I was thinking. I tried to put the cart before the horse…which made moving forward difficult.

That’s not to say that I was thinking about all the same things that other teens were thinking about — I wasn’t. But at the same time, I didn’t have any directed thinking toward anything else, and as a result any “thinking” that I wrote about was contrived. I also don’t mean that I needed to go and experience those things (sex, alcohol, drugs, rebellion, etc) and then write about them. I haven’t experienced any of those yet, and I don’t feel left out. Writing about something different is good, and even right. But doing it for the sake of being different is not. It has to come out of who I am, and not just what I think.

It reminded me of something that I heard a pastor say one time. His name is Bill Johnson, and love him or hate him, I like this. He said, “I only preach out of revelation. I only preach something if it’s a part of me. Otherwise, I’m preaching from a head knowledge, and ‘knowledge puffs up’. That’s what got the Pharisees in trouble.”

I think we do that a lot. We want so deeply to be in a better place than where we are that we aren’t willing to be there for long enough to get a good footing so that we can take the next step. The fastest runners aren’t necessarily the ones that move their legs the fastest. The fastest runners are the ones that plant and drive.

And move their legs really fast, obviously. Duh.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t try, or that young people are stupid adolescents that don’t know anything about real life because they haven’t lived it yet. I think that’s all bunk. I’ve seen young people accomplish incredible things because they refused to settle for the idea that the only thing they’re capable of in their adolescent years I’d rebellion and irresponsibility. Reach, reach, reach! Strive to grow and do more than you’re capable right now — but be okay that you’re not there yet. None us have arrived.

Case in point; this post. I wrote this in one sitting on my iPad, in not too many minutes. Used to, I would take weeks to write a much shorter post. I just didn’t have the knowledge base, experience base, or — honestly — the wisdom to put something together. It hadn’t become a part of me yet.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Or am I the only one who ever had to struggle with any of that?