Fast or Famine?

It's a holiday week with a lot of things going on. In the blogosphere, I've noticed that Dan from Cerulean Sanctum has called for The Blogout for the Kingdom, where he urges bloggers to lay off the blog for this week and instead go out and do the work of the Kingdom instead of just writing about it. A few have taken Dan's suggestion. I commend all of those people for doing so. Dan wrote that he was going to handwrite "letters to folks who have blessed my walk with Christ, thanking them for what they poured into me." That's cool. I hope that the other bloggers who participate will experience the thrill of being used in a great way for the Kingdom.

I don't want to appear as if I'm ridiculing or belittling the efforts of any of these bloggers, because I'm not. However I'm hoping that those people and every single one of us can take it to the next step.

I've struggled with a weight problem for most of my life. I know a thing or two about diets. That doesn't mean I can stay on one, but I know all about 'em! What I've found is that for a diet to work, a person has to change his lifestyle permanently. A year of dieting followed by a year of not dieting will usually turn out badly. It's the yo-yo diet effect. The weight goes down, the weight comes up. You get the picture.

I've known people who will fast as a quick diet. Take two days off from eating. Then on the third day, they head to the nearest smorgasbord. Obviously that makes no sense, but they were convinced they were doing something good.

I've known people who signed up with weight loss programs where you eat specially prepared and packaged food purchased from the weight loss center. Usually it works very well, but once they stopped buying the special food the weight came back. If you want to keep weight off, you must keep a lifestyle you can live with until they load you into the hearse. A quick 20 pound loss may work to get you into an old pair of jeans or to look good for the class reunion, but there are few good lasting effects.

In the case of blogging, a fast can be very refreshing. It's a chance to clear your head. It provides an opportunity to spend more time with family or accomplishing good for the Kingdom, as Dan is promoting. But might I suggest structuring your normal routine to put that stuff first and moving the blog down the priority scale a bit. We're not to be working toward our own glory anyway, right?

I've read countless posts about bloggers feeling pressure to post and others apologizing for not posting. Perhaps our first priority as bloggers should be to bring us closer to our Savior and not to move us up the TTLB ecosystem. My call is for bloggers not to be slaves to our blogs. Our everyday lives should provide us the time to interact with people who need our encouragement, support, interest and company. Blog because you have something you have to say instead of simply coming up with a post. And above all, work toward glorifying God through all we do -- especially that stuff we do while away from the keyboard.

Now if you'll excuse me, Thanksgiving is coming and I'm going to blow my diet.