Just Rambling...

I haven't been writing on my blog as much as I have in the past. I suppose there are several reasons for that, but one of the main ones is that over the past year or so, I began to see that I kept saying a lot of the same things over and over again. For a preacher in a pulpit, that works just fine. Recycled sermons are the lifeblood of a pastor's Sunday mornings. But when your sermons are written out and published online for posterity to ponder on, it doesn't work quite as well.

Looking back over where I was when I started this journey to where I am now, I know that I'm not the same person I was in many, very important ways. I'd like to think that the gray in my hair and beard reflects some wisdom I've acquired along the way and not just poor genetics and a stressful life.

I have been writing lately, just not anything of real spiritual or philosophical import. Instead I've been working on my fiction writing with both fan fiction and original stuff that I've been posting online on various sites as well. I actually started writing fiction first when I was nine with a one page short story called “The Fury of Samod” on a manual typewriter which my mom used. This was before we had our first “real” computer back in 1984, a Tandy 1000EX with 256 KB of RAM, no hard drive, and less than VGA graphics. I think it might have had a 286 processor? Maybe? I wrote different short stories up through high school on that old computer, and then later used one just like it in college. While everyone else was getting acquainted with Windows 3.1 and '95, I was still using DOS on a floppy and a text based word processor for all of my papers with a Dot Matrix printer, but I digress.

As I've been writing and publishing my work online, I've actually been getting people dowinloading and reading it. They've even liked it! No, it's not the NY Times Bestseller list, but a few hundred people over the last few months is still a few hundred people more than were reading it while it just sat gathering digital dust on my hard drive.

As I've been working on my latest fan fiction project, “Xena: Warrior Princess – Crossroads,” it occurred to me, this is another audience for me to try and reach with what I understand the path of Jesus Christ to be. More to the point, it's an audience that probably wouldn't bother reading my blog, or anyone else's for that matter if it's openly theological or spiritual. But they do like reading about The Legend of Zelda, or Xena, or Star Trek, or a number of the same TV shows, movies, and video game stories I've been using as spiritual illustrations for years now. No, I can't be blatant about it, but I can sneak in ideas and concepts here and there.

My latest project is a little more blatantly Christian than normal, although it will still probably have my more conservative brothers and sisters screaming at me. That's okay. Because in the last week since I began posting chapters, it's been getting an average of ten views a day from around the world. That's at least ninety people now that I've had a chance to introduce Jesus and what He taught to in a non threatening way.

So maybe I still am rambling just as much as I used to. It's just that these days my rambles have a lot more heros, villains, and dragons to slay in them.