As a mouthy person (mostly on paper, sometimes in person), I have a very expensive habit. As it turns out, your strengths end up being your worst weakness, and I guess writing is one of my strengths. Unfortunately.

Let’s start with numbers to illustrate the problem that’s concerning, using myself as an example.

On average, my posts range from 800 to 2000 words. So let’s just say 1000 words. In my Substack account, I have 176 draft posts waiting to be finished, and have published 375 posts. I have ten podcasts as of this post. I have written seven books.1

My earliest website from 1998 had the J Letters, and there were probably about 60 of these early blog posts. From there, I went to Blogger. My old Blogger blogs have 3,051 published posts, give or take a few from smaller blogs I didn’t bother to count. In my WordPress blog, the second iteration of the Lone Prairie Blog, I have around 2,200 blog posts (the backup method used makes it tricky to get a precise tally).

This doesn’t count the blog posts I wrote either as a guest writer or in partnership with someone else (for example, a book discussion blog). I’m estimating about 50 or so blog posts there. I won’t count the blog posts I wrote for clients, as my name isn’t on them and they are benign, professional topics.

I probably should include long-form social media posts (Substack notes, X, Facebook), which I’m going to put around the 1,500+ mark, assuming that’s a lowball considering how long I’ve been on Facebook and how much I’ve used those platforms at different times. Let’s add Reddit posts and comments, of which there are four posts and 86 comments, of which about half of them are me arguing with Canadians, and I’m not proud of that. Let’s also add to that the years of responding on other forums and comment sections that no longer exist, which I’d estimate to be in the range of 2,000 thanks in no small part to arguments with Calvinist Reformed dude bros and trolls.

Hold on, though, because there are the emails I’ve sent. Most are professional or fine, but with friends, they might have been off-color (and easily taken out of context by anyone but a friend), and with random people contacting me from my website just because they could, some were downright angry. I would estimate that number to be in the 4,000+ range.

I’ve written probably 300+ handwritten letters, but oddly enough, because I can type faster than I write, I tend to get less fiery and regretfully behaved when writing longhand, so there’s a regulator in place (there could be a lesson to be learned there). Typing makes it easy to snap back fast. I’m less concerned about the handwritten letters.

We’re not even going to talk about the bookshelves of my personal journals—100+ I’m guessing—because at least others haven’t read those, though God certainly knows what I wrote and that what was in my heart wasn’t always good. There’s some accountability there.

Those are the words I’ve written. There are also the words I have not yet written.

I don’t have a shortage of ideas—people predisposed to ponder don’t—though sometimes a shortage of timely motivation. I mention that, and this next set of numbers, because what’s at issue is creating regular content. So, I have a document where I just drop all the blog post ideas I get to clear my head. In there, I have 182 blog post ideas that are different from the Substack draft post ideas. I also have a recording app that lets me quickly capture ideas while I’m out walking, as well as an email folder in which I write or forward emails that would make great blog posts.

It is only the journals, unpublished drafts, and blog post ideas that have not yet been said aloud; the rest of this is essentially a list of all the words I have put out there over most of my adult life and am accountable to God for, and though I am eternally (literally) grateful for Jesus Christ, those words still landed somewhere on someone and either damaged or encouraged.

I’ve written a lot of things over the years. I can’t remember most of them. But I am still responsible for them.

This puts the fear of God in me; I don’t know why “Christian” talking heads and podcasters say the things they do unless they aren’t considering this reality.

We will give an account for every idle word (Matthew 12:36-37). I maintain that anyone who is writing, speaking, or in any way creating content is, essentially, teaching, and there is a greater burden of stricter judgment on teachers (James 3:1). Our mouth does, indeed, lead us into sin (Ecclesiastes 5:6). The evil things we say trouble our days (1 Peter 3:10). Seriously, there are so many places in the Bible where we are warned about what we say that I don’t think you’d have any trouble finding many more, especially in Proverbs.

So now we get to the issue of writing either because you have to or you’d explode, versus writing because you have to, to maintain an audience. Enter the upcoming generations of online writers who struggle for ideas, difficult to imagine since I’ve not really had that experience myself, yet understanding that the marketable niche blogs of today narrow the available topics.

For such folks, the content calendar is often necessary.

An editorial calendar, or content calendar, is where you plan and communicate about all the content—written, video, social, ads—for a brand. I’m very familiar with them because I once worked for a startup whose product was a content calendar focused on content strategy, planning, and creation for content marketing.2

There is the very real problem of coming up with ideas of things to talk about. A content calendar forces you to plan ahead so you know you will create content. Even if you’re not inspired, you have the headline and topic, and by golly, you will write or create that thing, just like a real job.3 The calendar helps you know what to write. It can get you into a positive writing habit. For me, through client work and deadlines, I developed a solid method for writing about something, whether I was interested or not. That’s a useful skill, and a content calendar kind of kicks you in the pants in the same way.

Here’s the problem: once the calendar takes the lead, your writing is in service to it.

In a sense, a writer with the best writing habits will have a kind of content calendar running in the back of the mind, because productive but creative writing is a lot more structured and habitual than some might think. The difference is that the writer is driving, not the calendar. Content calendars, left to drive the process, are dangerous—especially for Christians—who should be careful about what and when they speak. If they are creating niche content on the Christian faith, or lack a good editor or an editorial restraint system, they are building up lots of words and heaping judgment on themselves.

This content calendar problem, whether it’s a formal calendar or just the content creator knowing he has to X number of content pieces this week, has led more Christians to say things they shouldn’t have said, sow rifts, and chase down targets for discernment —whether valid or not—all because the content calendar demands it.

God might not be directing them to talk about something, but they must talk about something. They need three new videos and two blog posts this week to keep up engagement. They gotta interview the people all the others in their niche are interviewing—and you want to be pleasant to them so you keep getting interviews—in order to network and get in a regular shared audience. And those interviewees? They’d better find something to talk about, regardless of whether it’s wise to platform some people and expose your audience to them.

The content calendar is god.

If you stop creating content, you lose your audience. That means you lose your money and platform. Your influence quickly fades. Follower counts and engagement dwindle.

The question of motivation is a big part of this discussion.

I write not because of a content calendar, but because my head would explode otherwise. I very much know the difference between a content calendar driving your content creation and your brain running rampant with things to explore and write about. The latter is far less profitable but also less louche, feeling less like selling your soul and more like maintaining it.

As I’ve often told young people with art degrees, there is a very big difference between being a fine artist and a production artist, and you’d better know yourself well, or it’s going to be a painful discovery process. The same can be said for writing: I keep one kind for myself (“fine art”) and another for clients (“production art”). The first is about the motivation I need to keep my brain engaged in life, and the second is the motivation to pay my bills. I do not want the motivation to pay my bills to sully the first, or I’ll soon be doing A/B testing on clickbait headlines to grow my Substack subscriptions.

Both are art, but in their proper understanding; this protects the soul.

It’s not just motivation, of course, but also understanding end results.

Some folks are backward, thinking that the success they have with their platform and content-creation mill is proof that God has blessed them and that they should continue with their methods. It does not occur to them that the enemy might leave them alone if they’re doing a good job of doing his evil work of creating and feeding disagreement and anger. You can get a kind of “dark” blessing simply by doing the devil’s work so he’s freed up to bother someone else.

Pro tip: blessings from God bring glory to God, not to self. Anything that elevates self is a curse, not a blessing.

When I started writing my little website articles almost 30 years ago, I did it just to mess around with HTML and CSS and FTP, and to enjoy discovering website code and putting random stuff online over dial-up. I did not intend for anyone beyond my local family and friends to read it.

But others did read it.

Charles Barkley might not have wanted to be a role model and mind his behavior, but he was one regardless. The moment you are elevated above others—your voice is heard and known, your platform is large, your work is seen outside of your immediate sphere—you are now responsible and will answer to God for what you do with your words and that influence.

It’s a terrifying thing.

I wouldn’t seek it out.

I don’t understand today’s idea of purposeful influencers from any angle, in light of what I’ve said here. There are a lot of podcasters, talking heads, cable news windbags, and bloggers storing up wrath. We must acknowledge that reality, and make things right when possible.

We also have to exercise self-control. I assure you that there are many whiz-bang blog posts full of snark and cutting words I could have written (and used to in my early blogging days when, thankfully, there were fewer readers online), but much of that gets deleted during editing. Some sneaks in, to my great chagrin; it is hard to remove a wicked sharp metaphor at times.

Maybe this isn’t an issue for you, but if it is, I know how hard it is to control the tongue. If you have to start somewhere, consider how your mom would feel if she read what you’d written. But if you have to end somewhere, seriously consider what God thinks because he knows what you’ve said and written, and even what you’ve thought.

I guess it’s more important to be sure you’re creating content that encourages and points to Jesus Christ than to build your platform. If your content calendar says you have to say something to keep people around, even if God is asking you to be silent on a matter, you’re going to say something you’ll regret.

They’re out there on the edge, at the cusp of flying off into the nothingness that comes from being so far from the center of centrifugal force. There is nothing but imbalance in an extreme, be it politics or personal worldview. What starts as a curious wander to the edge picks up a slow wobble until it becomes uncontrollable chain reaction.

The dead of winter and the dead of summer are the same kind of extreme—no one says the “dead” of spring or the “dead” of fall—because they are the hottest humid hot versus the coldest dry cold. Spring and fall—the beautiful seasons—are the truce between the battles. They have no dead.

For an introvert who looks for excuses to be away from people, who prefers tea and books and museums and darkish quiet instead of bright sun and heat—you can always get warmer, but you can only take so many clothes off—the winter is the lesser of the evils in some sense. Beach vacations are a hideous thought; vacation advertisements with beach and lake life are some circle of hell I know not what. Sun and sand and sweat and sun lotion and human bodies in various stages of exposing underwear—it’s a horror.

Summer up here in North Dakota is daylight almost all the time. The sun sets at 10:30 p.m. and rises just a few hours later, around 5:30 a.m. There is no excuse for laziness in summer, no reasonable explanation for staying indoors to read and think. The obligation to get outside and manhandle the garden and the earth around you is real, creating a strange culture in which certain hobbies, as much as you enjoy them, are relegated to the winter when you are forced to be indoors. Sewing, art, reading—get thee behind me, for the temperature is above freezing and we must be outside in it. We are a slave to the tilt of the earth.

“We only have three months!” is the battle cry, and so all such living has to be crammed into a quarter of the year. The pressure to grab at all remotely outdoor-associated activities is real, and each weekend is a wearying conglomeration of lawn care, gardening, camping, and forced enjoyment of the outdoors. Social media is flooded with people forcing themselves into as much outdoor adventure as they can, no small pressure if you’ve spent the day shamefully indoors and the thought of high exercise versus high tea is a no-brainer.

The outdoors in July and August is a damp, dank, heavy-aired blanket that smells of life and death, a mix of sweet, tangy, or minty weeds, and pollen, with just a hint of decaying flesh where small animals have succumbed to mortality. Wood ticks and mosquitoes vie for your lifeblood, and sweat and sunburn work to destroy your body’s largest organ. The battle against pests—squirrels, rabbits, wasps, thistles, bindweed—is as turbo-charged as the rest of summer life for they, too, have to cram a lot of living in three months. Each year, spring has the hope of a tidy garden and the excitement of seeing new things grow; by August you want to take a flamethrower to the place. June through August, the storms scour the earth, and you hope an F4 finger of God doesn’t drop near you.

By mid-August, I’m desperately hoping for the killing frost to give me relief from the garden and the bugs and the expectations, for the first blizzard so I can sit in my chair and sip tea and read a book without any guilt, for the blissful months where I don’t need to worry about pulling weeds and what pest is destroying what part of the garden today. All of the client projects that are stacking up, that they are “touching base” on, scream at me to be done while I know that the tomatoes need to be dealt with.

Morning walks are ever earlier in an attempt to beat the heat, though the humidity, regardless of the temperature, rests heavy and you curse the dew point. At some point, at the end of July or early August, you consider going for a walk at 4 a.m. just for a reprieve from all the blasted sun and heat. Opening the windows to let in fresh air is made moot; since everyone is outside, so is all of their noise—barking dogs, screaming kids, squeaking swing sets, fighting spouses, leaf blowers and lawnmowers—and it occurs to you that the quietest time to enjoy the outdoors is when it’s too cold to do so. We are all moving in and out together, a human conveyor belt in sync with the tilt and rotation of this blue marble.

But I must be clear about something.

I could never live where there weren’t four distinct seasons; I need the hope that comes in the cycle that provides that hibernation break as well as the re-emergence from sleep, as disappointing and Sisyphean as such a cycle can sometimes seem. The limits in the garden—Zone 3 perennials are much less than the warmer climes—force creativity in partnership with disappointment and crossing your fingers, and the cruelty of winter is like three months of Sundays and forced retrenchment.

Honesty requires me to acknowledge that, having four seasons this far north, so much of life is mostly like unfinished canvases; you might get close, but winter is soon here. Time is never shorter or more personal than in the north country.

If a truck full of freedom rolls into a town near you, you should go.

After wander…

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Verse 8 is interesting, but we’ll get there.

First, you have to feel for Paul. He left the Galatians not long ago, and within a very short time, traveling preachers had arrived and poisoned the water hole. We’ll get into the details of what they were teaching in a later lesson, but for now, let’s take a closer look at how Paul lays …

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The opening verses of Paul’s letters are easy to fly past to get to the meat of the letter. They often sound similar, for one thing, and it sometimes seems like the skip-over yada yada yada parts that we tend to skim to get to the greatest hits.

I’m guilty of doing that, but let’s not do that this time.

Paul starts his letter to the G…

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“If you don’t know what transcendentalism is,” said Wren, our delightfu…

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If we were to assign each of the seven deadly sins to a month of the year, perhaps it would look like the list below:

January is envy month.

February is lust month.

March.

April is wrath month.

May.

June is pride month.1

July is sloth month.

August.

September.

October.

November is gluttony month.

December is greed month.

Keep in mind that pride has historically been …

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We had been tasked to get some helium balloons to tie at the end of the driveway so people would know where the graduation party was. We’d picked three: two pink hearts and a round white “congrats” balloon.

Within an hour, only the white balloon remained; the two hearts had slipped their surly bonds and lofted upwards, exploding somewhere high above when…

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Well, me, sort of.

I like rules that keep things orderly and functioning. I like general or broad rules that assume people have common decency and common sense to function without a heavy, detailed explanation of what is required. I like such rules to be followed. I like cultural norms and rules that create high-trust soci…

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Ecclesiastes tells us there is a time for everything under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 3:1-11)

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens,” the passage starts, and then lists the most impossible collection and pairing of events that you could imagine. Birth and death, starting and stopping, gathering and casting away, w…

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No, I’m not deconstructing.

No, I’m not fudging the lines and becoming progressive.

No, I’m not saying what God has said is true has come into doubt.

The Bible has not changed, regardless of what the culture tries to insist.

But in my younger years, I wielded the Bible like a sword to chop people …

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We can see the sky clearly now that the human virus is almost gone.

The
sky so clear
roads so empty
cars so silent
office lights turned off.

We’re thrilled to see you lose your job so nature could take over.

So glad you dirty humans aren’t
touching
hugging
caressing
comforting
hol…

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This is probably more for my own benefit than yours, possibly.

The act of writing, whether private or public, h…

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There is a limit to how many signs a store should have.

Pandemic signs made shopping more complicated than rebuilding a transmission. It was either for safety or an effort to ward off a lawsuit. It left shoppers scratching their head in wonder.

Signs about times reserved for certain groups. Lining up outs…

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And now we get to our annual trip to the Twin Cities for Shepherd’s Harvest, a fiber festival that features several vendor buildings and a barn wher…

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For all the ladies who get hysterical online, I sure wish you wouldn’t.1

Back in the day, when the medical community didn’t wash their hands and thought bleeding the bad blood out of a person was a swell idea, female hysteria was an actual medical diagnosis.

Yet again, a win …

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The concert started with everyone clapping along to Offenbach’s cancan (Orpheus in the Underworld), the synchronized racket bouncing around the auditorium full of smiling faces. It ended with Ravel’s Bolero, which people either love or hate. Seeing it live is to love it. When it was over, the audience roared to its feet.

Bolero has one basic tune that r…

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Grandma Helen was a tender soul who rarely said no to any of her grandchildren.

She was kind-hearted (though she did spank my sister when she heard her say a swear word out in the garden), and we grandkids thought that was a license to ask her anything.

O…

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