You're Welcome, Internet: Ten Years of Loud Time

Today marks my tenth anniversary posting to this blog. I haven't gone to great lengths to publicize it or promote it; I've just posted here and there and shared the links through whatever means were available to me at the time. In the beginning I didn't have Facebook or Twitter or any social media presence, apart from my work blog. Now I don't have a work blog, and in fact blogs may well have run their course. I, of course, blog on, undeterred.

I may, over the course of the next year, repost some of my favorites from the past decade, and when I do you may assume that I've been too lazy to write something new. In any case, I've enjoyed keeping this log of my interactions with books, films, music, and people for ten years. If you've read any of my nearly eight hundred posts, then thanks; if you've commented, God bless you. If you've shared my posts with other people, is there anything I can do for you?

Here's the text of my first post. Enjoy!

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Long Overdue

It's about time I blogged privately. I've been designated blogger for InterVarsity Press, where I work as an editor, for three years now: I post to Strangely Dim weekly. But I've been wanting to do my own thing, unconstrained by the needs of the press. So here I go.

I've liked the idea of Loud Time for a Long Time. I come from a subculture that puts a lot of emphasis on the Quiet Time as the critical ingredient for spiritual growth. That's all well and good, except that you can only effectively be quiet in isolation, and while occasional isolation is a good thing, most of life is lived in real time with real people.

Enter Loud Time! In this blog I'll blather away about virtually anything, but my chief aim is to borrow wisdom from others and extend both the range and the depth of my relationships. If Loud Time is anything, it is a conviction that God abides with us even when we are not alone--which is perhaps a novel concept--and even when we are not quiet--which is perhaps a controversial subject. We grow together, which to my mind is how God intended it.