Fearing the blog

One of the reasons I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the blogisphere is something that I affectionately termed Robinson's First Law of Consulting: once it leaves your hand, it's gone. You can't take it back. You will always be required to acknowledge that it's out there. Math mistakes can't be corrected. Even when you send the client a new piece of paper, saying "oops, we goofed on our math, here is a new page 36 of the report," you still have to deal with the OLD page 36, and why you made the mistake, and why it makes a difference, and why you weren't smart enough to do it right the first time. "Sorry, I forgot to carry the two" just doesn't work as an acceptable answer.

Even when it's not your fault. A printing error, for example. That's why we had editors and proofreaders. The editor at my first job was amazing. Fast, accurate, smart enough to remember all the different clients, smart enough to know what all the different disciplines of the practice were talking about.

At my first job out of graduate school, we were constantly making last-minute (and I mean, knock on the closed door waving $20 bills kind of last minute) FedEx runs. First one I did, I swore it would never happen again. Not on MY project. Trouble was, I was never really in charge... or at least I console myself with that sometimes. I kept score by pulling off the little tracking number sticky tabs on the package and pasting them on the dashboard of my car. By the time we gave that car away to charity, there was a collection of them, spaced about an inch apart, running all the way across the dashboard to the passenger window.

Sure enough, things got missed. The typos were embarrassing, but the hurried mistakes were worse. Even when it said "draft" on it in big fat letters. Never mattered.

Then there's deliberate misinterpretation. This last week, my bishop was quoted in The Living Church, which was nice, except that he was selectively quoted. In fact, the quotation was lifted in such a manner as to mean exactly the opposite of what he intended to say. And he was only talking about the Windsor Report.

And now, here I am, daring to do the ultimately arrogant thing of talking about God.

Now do you know why I fear the blog? That once you publish something in this format it's out there for the world to see? (never mind there are a handful of you reading this, it's my fear, it doesn't have to be rational.)

For one thing, I'm just not that good. My theology isn't always going to be consistent. My descriptions of God and of scripture and of life are a work in process. But this is a world where nominated supreme court justices are questioned about opinion papers they wrote before my little sisters were born. Here you go, here's enough rope to hang me. Oh, a little more? Sure.

Second, to quote my friend Jim Flowers, you can't talk about the Trinity for more than five minutes without committing some kind of early-church heresy. But what's a little heresy among friends?

Third, I'm a storyteller. I'm going to run out of stories to tell eventually. And if I do this, I can't even move to a new congregation and re-tell them. (okay, this fear makes the massive leap that the new congregation will find and read this. But it's my fear, and it doesn't have to be rational to be real.)