Reboot

It's been almost 4 years since my last blog post. In college, I blogged fairly regularly with poetry and random little essays. It helped me work on developing my voice as a writer and learn to get comfortable writing for an audience. Which I now have to do every week, albeit in a different format, as a preacher. Then after college, I was in seminary and doing tons of academic writing and writing weekly sermons. Then the year after that I was in full time ministry learning two brand new contexts. 
Now, with the end of Annual Conference, begins my second year of full time ministry and my fourth year of pastoral ministry. And I am convinced that for me to sustain this calling I'm going to have to write. Writing and especially writing poetry is the deepest kind of prayer there is for me. In poetry I can say things to God and hear things from God I never could any other way. 
So some of that is just for me and God. But some of it, I can share, and should share, if there's a chance the Holy Spirit might speak in it for someone else, and so I can grow as a writer. I also hope that blogging publicly will hold me accountable to keep taking time to write, instead of letting work take up all my energy and succumbing to the lazy leisure of television and the Internet. Writing is a more difficult but more rewarding Sabbath. 
Back in 2012 when I began I gave this blog I gave it a rather cliched but heartfelt title. It still fits me. I am a wanderer, itinerant like Jesus. As a United Methodist pastor, I have no permanent home but wander to wherever I am sent. As a writer, I wander, exploring truths from different angles, following threads of inspiration, fragments of verse, wherever they take me. As a Christian, I wander, on a journey to grow in grace and become more and more like Jesus each day. 
The path is uncertain, many particulars unknown, and yet I am not lost. God is with me, and so I can wander but never get truly lost. 
Indeed, I suspect the more I wander in my writing, the more I will be found.