400 Chances To Get It Right---Mostly Human, Rarely Divine

The number 400 holds many distinctions: Forbes has a list of the 400 wealthiest, most powerful folks (leading to the more-recognizable 500); it's the name of a famous Atari computer, a baseball average, and the number of days in a Gregorian calendar. But today, for me, it's the number of blog posts I've completed to date.

Since May of 2010, I've been taking a few hours each week to stare at a blank Blogger page, working diligently to compose a few paragraphs encompassing my crazy way of thinking and points-of-view, with musings on music, worship, family, and any other random subject that popped into my head. Many thanks to those of you who stopped by to read my posts over the past three years.

As you may already know, I am in the midst of composing a book on worship for leaders and teams, tentatively titled, Worship Foundry. It's in the final stretch, and I am so happy to have come through, thus far, with very little discouragement. The trial and error of writing a blog post here each week has helped me hone my book-writing skills, and I have been privileged to have tens of thousands of views from folks who patiently overlooked my grammatical and spelling errors. Hopefully you've ignored the flaws to see what I fought hard to say, but failed to accomplish technically. 

The main thing I've learned to appreciate through writing is that the process is really hard. Most prose writers, just as in great songwriting, rework their compositions over and over until they end up with a lean finished product, hopefully containing just enough information to carry the piece, but not too much useless fat to weigh it down. Stephen King said in his book, On Writing, "To write is human, to edit is divine." He also wrote, "When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.” These statements are as true for crafting a blog as they are with a book.

So today, with 400 blog posts under my belt, I'll pull back and look at the forest. I know I'll be tempted to pick everything apart and edit it to death. But it's true: I've loved every minute of this whole crazy adventure.

Here's to year four. I pray you'll be back here again for blog post #401. Cheers!