In October, I'll pass my thirteenth anniversary of writing this blog! It started as a suggestion from a guy I knew at Harding University who was in the book business at the time. David Barnett came to one of our WCS teachers' meetings and made a short presentation about his company, if memory serves me correctly. We were reintroduced and he learned I had penned a book two years before. David asked me if I was writing a blog and I answered that I was not. He told me I needed to if I wanted to sell books. The next day,
Benedicte Magali Ilana Ingeborg Matuszczak, who was one of my teacher's aides that year, set it up for me on my school computer and away I went. My first entry was how NFL star Bill Romanowski motivated himself, in his own word, by hate. Because of the blog, I ended up getting a laptop and the Internet in my apartment and then came the inevitable wireless and even more inevitably, more laptops. The writing of these nightly entries greatly improved my computer skills as well as my typing ablities. The blog, named after my book, was a great blessing keeping family and friends informed when Dad had a stroke in the summer of 2007, a stroke which took his life nine months later. I did not even have a cell phone at the time of the stroke so it became a lifeline. Facebook also changed the dissemination of this material when I joined in May of 2011. I began posting the link every night with the title and a short description on my status. About that time, I also began sending it to our school faculty and staff through a nightly e-mail. And shortly after that, I began adding people on my school google account who wanted to receiver my daily mission updates from Vietnam. Before long, I was up to about two hundred in that group. Occasionally, google would randomly block everything I sent to my blog group outside the school so I split it in two. Last week, I divided the two into four after being blocked once more- there is never any explanation. (If you don't get your blog from me, now you know why!)
Let me go back to the sending the nightly blog out as an e-mail. What I do is go to my blog online, copy it, paste it on my e-mail account, and send it out to my now five groups. Usually I do this through google chrome which is my browser of choice. Several nights ago, however, I opened my blog on Internet Explorer. When I highlighted it and opened the options so I could copy it, I saw a choice I had never seen before: read aloud. I clicked it, and sure enough, I heard my words come to life. Well, not exactly to life. They voice sounds slightly akin to what you might hear on a GPS system when you're making a left turn in 1/4 mile. I was fascinated but in a hurry so I just kind of let it go to a more opportune time.
This afternoon, as I worked on packing my suitcases for my mission trip to Vietnam which is forty-eight hours away, I decided to listen to myself. I intentionally found one of my blogs about my mother and listened to my own words for the first time. It was surreal. I won't say it sounded natural- I cringed with the inevitable mispronunciations but I found myself oddly captivated like someone else was talking about my mom and we had common memories in the entry from 2005. There is something to be said about hearing instead of, or maybe, in conjunction with reading. Did you know that the books of the law had to be read aloud to the people of Israel every seven years? Talk about a long service!! But I remember worship times when my father was our preacher where entire books of the Bible were read in a congregational setting. That's just not done much anymore as far as I can tell. I'm a better listener than reader. Maybe I'll go back and listen to a bunch of my devotionals; I need to find out if they're any good. I try to listen to the scriptures as often as I can but there's a difference in my purpose. I already know they're good.
Applicable quote of the day:
Neil Gaiman
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