BERNARD SHUFORD

I guess I’ll take the “Likes” system off the blog, to prevent jamming up the system.

Either nobody likes the stuff, which is discouraging news, or the idea of clicking a button to tell me that you like my stuff just hasn’t caught on.

Definitely don’t want to waste speed and network resources on a useless feature.

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This website is titled as “bernardshuford.com”.  My general interpretation of that is that this should be a blog about Bernard Shuford.

The only problem is that there’s a lot more to me than thoughts about theology.  I like my wife, my kids, football, basketball, baseball, Nascar (sometimes), photography, guitars, piano, chess, airplanes, and computers.  Yet, I’m a Christian, so I think a lot about things Christian.  When I write, it nearly always has a Christian theme. 

That frustrates me.  I want to blog about other stuff, too, but when I do, nobody cares.  My loyal readers are Christians, and they like stuff about theology, Christianity, the Christian life, etc. 

So, I don’t know what to do. 

I want my blog to be a community of sorts, but it’s very difficult to maintain a community based on five or six different subjects.  At the same time, I don’t want to have three, four, or five different blogs, because I don’t have enough content about all that other stuff to justify a full blog.  Or, maybe I’m just not committed enough to them. 

So…  I’m just thinking.  I don’t know what I’ll do.  I’m just realizing, more and more, that our Christianity should invade everything we are rather than replacing it. 

Y’all help me think.

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Just a note to all of you out there who DON’T have an option to subscribe by email on your blog…

I don’t use my RSS reader very much anymore.

So, basically, if I can’t subscribe to your blog by email, I probably don’t get to read it.  That sometimes disappoints me, because some of you have some really good blogs that I miss out on. 

It’s just the way I roll. 

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Time to sleep. Busy day tomorrow.  Busy weeks ahead.

The next few weeks and months may see less blogging.  I don’t know.  I have so much I want to say, but I have so much I want to read.  I simply don’t have the time to really research and compose well written articles.  I hope to turn out some good stuff.

Real life.  Hopefully I won’t disappear.  Y’all stay tuned.

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Somewhere between fantasy and reality, there exists the online world of blogdom, Facebook, and Twitter.

Several heavyweights in the blog world have lately declared a fast of sorts.  Names like Anne Jackson and Carlos Whitaker come to mind.  This post is not at all a condemnation of their “fasts”, but a rambling of sorts with that as a starting point.

Six plus inches of snow separated me from the online world today, due to the fact that our internet service is provided by WildBlue satellites.  Snow, clouds, rain, and other minor inconveniences for normal Americans become disasters of huge proportion for WildBlue users.  Our eyes water, our fingers twitch, and our heart aches to see if Joe Bob Sally Jim has updated his Facebook status. 

I played in the snow today.  I snowboarded.  I snowball fit.  (That’s the past tense of “fight”).  I drove backward down a steep hill in a two wheel drive van that was determined to not go up that hill.  I prayed for a balky Jeep to start after it refused to do so, and wow, praise God, it started!  I prayed for Karma’s mom’s power to come back on, and dadjim, twenty minutes later she called to say the power was back on.  It almost scared me to have two distinct prayers answered in the space of about two hours.  (Had I finally learned the right secret words to say????)

I had a blast. 

The snow filling that little dish on top of the Shuford household caused me not the slightest amount of stress, even though it was the first day of the 6th Tournament over at Chess.com. 

I was rather surprised at all the fun I had. 

All this said fun was not, of course, solely connnected to being disconnected.  But that disconnection didn’t kill me. 

I have met a LOT of people via the Internet.  In a sense, I’m very proud of the online community that I have. 

I simply want it to be an EXTENSION of who I am, and not a replacement for the real “me”.  I love my Internet friendships, and I have no plans to discontinue them.  I do, however, want to pursue them as real friendships, not just as bits and bytes or as an escape from “the real world”.  The “real world”, after all, is the real world. 

Life is a good thing.  I want to enjoy it, not just write about how much I use to enjoy it. 

Live like you are really alive.  Because, as Christ’s followers, we are. 

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