Blogging is supposed to be dead, you know. People don’t read blogs. It’s a waste of time to write blog posts when people want tweets. We read on phone, not computers, and therefore don’t want long-form reflection.

We all know that’s not true, don’t we? What circulated endlessly just last week, provoking laughter, cringing, some (gross) support, and Gospel responses? A blog post about what men prefer in women.

People still read blogs. Of course, the best way to get people to read your blog is to be controversial, to be relevant, to be already famous when you start one. But more than we need people who still read blogs, we need people who still write blogs.

It’s spring! Ok, here in Kentucky we had snow last week but technically, it’s spring. So let’s celebrate with some favorite things!

My Current Worship Playlist: 

I made a new worship playlist and it’s on pretty much all day. It’s a mix of TobyMac, Christy Nockels, Mandisa, and even a few songs that I listened to in high school.

I’m picky about the fiction I read. I open myself and let the stories march straight in. The characters move into my heart and I feel pain when they make bad decision. I feel anguish when life crushes them. I live those stories through them and obviously, that’s the point.

The problem is that I carry those emotions into my life. I still feel unsettled when I’m cooking dinner because Catherine and Heathcliff are tearing each other’s worlds apart. Or- my word- how will Harry live feeling responsible for Cedric Diggory’s death? Really, there are enough situations in my life and the lives of people I love that I don’t have a ton of emotions to throw away on “fake people.”

I’ve always been intrigued at the idea of writing fiction. I just finished reading Stephen King’s On Writing and it had a writing exercise in it. I was reading after the boys went to bed one night and got drawn into the prompt so I closed the book, opened my computer, and started typing. Over 1,000 words later, I felt satisfied with my ending to the story. Of course, it ended with blood pooling under the refrigerator but it was a Stephen King writing exercise.

What we behold is what we become. Input determines output. However you want to phrase it, what’s in front of our faces shapes us. When it comes to creativity, I have intentionally cultivated steady sources of inspiration and education. Today, I thought I would share five things that you might enjoy too.

Andrew Peterson I first heard Andrew at a homeschool conference this past spring. I attended a concert and heard his teaching session and was thoroughly impressed with how he incorporates so many different creative talents into his work. His music a little different from what I typically listen to but I love it.  (Also, I was fascinated to learn that he co-wrote several of my favorite VeggieTales songs.)

Last week I had a mental image of myself holding my coffee. Except instead of it being 30-year-old me, it was 50-year-old me.

It was a powerful image that I stopped to take in. Fifty. That’s only twenty years from now. My boys will be grown; even this tiny six-week-old will be twenty. Life will be drastically different.

There will be many things that happen in those twenty years that I have absolutely no control over. Thankfully, I believe that God is sovereign and ruling over all and I can trust Him. But there are some things that I do have control over and I believe that God expects me to steward those things.

In a large part, I get to decide what person I will be when I am 50. I get to decide by how I spend my time. It’s all well and good to say that I want  to do certain things- to be certain things- in twenty years but it’s another thing to do them today. And that’s the only way I get there in 20 years: I do them today.