Ten years ago this month, I began this blog.

At the time, I was a youth minister and in those pre-Facebook and Twitter days, I thought blogging would be an online way to connect with my students. The idea was that this space would be a place for dialogue, a place for us to explore our faith by asking questions and conversing together.

That didn’t EXACTLY happen.

By 2006, I was transitioning out of youth ministry altogether but this blog had already morphed into something more personal. Rather than existing simply as a repository for devotional material, my blog became a stream for sharing about a host of topics: music (mostly my favorites), sports (mostly baseball, specifically St. Louis Cardinals baseball), books, and family. I used this blog to work out some of what I was reading and studying in my Masters of Divinity program. The conversation was mostly civil, although a few of the political-theological conversations got a little hairy! (Especially that one about the American flag!) All of this seemed to coincide with “peak season” in the blogging world.

Then Facebook happened. And Twitter. And Instagram and everything else. And most people’s blogs that were once so active and full of life started collecting cobwebs.

I’ve thought about shutting down the blog several times over the years — I even went so far as to “go private” for a few months one year. But such thoughts were always short lived. I’m grateful now to have ten years worth of posts to look back on. At this point, I think the blog is best described as a way to mark time. It’s a snapshot of where I’m at in the moment.

In 2015, my goal is to post something every day. It might be a full-fledged post, it might be a random thought, it might be a picture….but the goal is to post something every day. I’m giving myself a pass on days when I’ll be out of the country; I already know of a couple of dates that I’ll be away from an Internet connection. But otherwise, I want the 11th year of the blog to be a daily record of the year.