daily java

Daily Java:

Now go and write down these words. (Isaiah 30:8)

I have been writing these articles for about three years now, both for this bulletin and for my blog online. I also usually put this article into the blog. I know that the blog readers, both of them, are dying to read it and it also saves me from having to write another article.

Here lately, I have also been putting some articles on Facebook on my page, so when it comes down to it, many of my bulletin articles do triple duty. More bang for the buck.

This article makes 1300 posts in my blog. That means that I have put 1300 articles online. The total wordage (is that a word?) as of the last blog post comes to 597,737 words.

In the past three or so years I have written almost 600,000 words. At about 500 words per bulletin article and an average of 500 to 900 words per article in general, that comes to a lot of writing. That is six books.

Someone asked me why I felt compelled to write so much and I had no answer. I have always written, both for newspapers and magazines, multitudes of bulletin articles in my nearly forty years of ministry, other stuff. In high school, the one thing I always got good grades on was music and English. I could always sing and I could always write.

My voice has decayed a considerable amount now, but I still can write. And the advent of the blog made it easier to write and saves the writing for others to read. In case you don’t know, blog is a word that is short for web log, or online journal. It was shortened from web log to just blog. People have blogs for everything from fish to nuts, religion to pornography, travel to collections of thimbles.

Every blog post I have made has begun with a scripture. That limits my audience but I don’t care. I have always found one that fits even if I have to take it a little out of context, like I did today. The rest of Isaiah 3:8-9 reads:

Write them in a book. They will stand until the end of time as a witness that these people are stubborn rebels who refuse to pay attention to the Lord’s instructions.

I don’t think most of you are stubborn rebels so that didn’t really fit. But one verse which does is Ecclesiastes 12:12:

Be careful, for writing books is endless, and much study wears you out. 

I have written at all conceivable hours from just getting up to late at night, 3:00 in the morning, when ill or angry, during fasts, just a whole bunch of stuff.

And I have always appreciated your comments about the bulletin article and am grateful you read it. It gives my offering of verbiage meaning when you know someone reads it and likes it.

This makes 1300 posts and 500 words right now. (God bless you – this is eleven more, but I don’t care.)

1001 posts

To tell you the truth - and I really do not know why I wouldn't, having 1000 posts kind of set me back. That is a lot of writing.

But I am back, for those who are reading.

God bless you.

daily java

Daily Java:

“There’s typing to say something, and there’s typing to make noise because there’s someone in the next cubicle and you want to sound busy, and there’s typing just to type and prime the pump, which is what this last sentence was. The only cure to looking at the page and not knowing what to say is to start saying something.”  James Lileks, Oct 11, 2011

I am rapidly coming up to 1000 posts on my blog. I have written over 500,000 words since January of 2009 when I started this blog.

The funny things is that what Mr Lileks says in his article quoted above is exactly what I do.

Sometimes I do not have the slightest idea what I will say and will just begin writing. When I do the words begin to organize themselves and sometimes even a scripture will come in to fit what I am writing about.

In fact, the apostle Paul’s comments in Romans 15:14-15 comes to mind:

I am fully convinced, my dear brothers and sisters, that you are full of goodness. You know these things so well you can teach each other all about them. Even so, I have been bold enough to write about some of these points, knowing that all you need is this reminder.

There. Now I have a scripture to go on. I really don’t necessarily need one, but almost everything I have written in the past year and more than a half has had a scripture attached to it. What I usually do is take it and put it at the front, but I am not going to this time, just for fun.

This is, after all, a blog that unashamedly says “java soaked theological philosophy and kind of associated blather” so I have to do something that is basically scripture oriented.

And besides that, my life is the Lord and his word and things around it, so it makes sense I would have a scripture.

But it is interesting how many times I just sit down and begin to noodle on the keyboard. And I always – I repeat, always – come up with something.

There is within me a burning desire to write that I did not fully realize until I got this blog. And 500,000 words later, I am still writing, I still have something to say.

Or at least I think I do. I am not sure anybody reads this. It is probably mostly drivel, and if printed out would make great kitty litter (it would have to be shredded, of course).

But write I do. And keep on writing. Sylvia Plath said: “I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still”

It was John Keats who said: “When I have fears that I may cease to be, Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain.” He was afraid that he would die before he got everything he was thinking about written down. I am not sure he did and probably everything he was thinking about was not worth writing down.

But still.

I have found that writing fills a need that I did not know I had. I have always liked to write. And quite frankly (although why I would lie to you I am not sure) (whoever you are) I did as well as I did (which was not very well) in high school English simply because I could write. Essays never bothered me as I tend to think in outlines and put words together easily.

Preaching and teaching always came easily too for that reason. I could just always put words together on the fly.

And really that is how I write: just kind of a free association kind of thing.

It seems to work.

read, read, read

“Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”  William Faulkner

I read a lot. Over the years, I have read a lot of diverse things. I thought it interesting when I found out that I was more widely read than many of the literature teachers I met. Although he was more widely read in his specialty area, I was more widely read than my college lit teacher who had his PhD in literature.

I just like to read. Of course, here lately, I have read more fiction than otherwise and for some reason, William Johnstone and Louis L’Amour books hold a special appeal. Maybe their simplicity, their black and white way of looking at things. Maybe, just maybe, they are like women’s romances. No, of course not. They are manly books. When the boy gets the girl, he usually gets shot too. So he has to go up into the mountains where the air is thinner and eat a lot of bacon and drink a lot of coffee to get well. That’s a real man’s book.

Anyway, reading has been a problem with me in my life. I had trouble in my first denomination, the Church of Christ, because of my reading. It was not a denomination that prized wide thinking. It had a certain viewpoint and all others were contrary and detrimental to the minister.

I knew a guy who went through his PhD in philosophy and never changed his viewpoint that was a minister of this denomination. That takes some work to read all that stuff and not be changed.

I read philosophy, and I read a lot of the eastern stuff. I read a lot of the Great Books of the Western World (a set of books I bought back in the early 70’s to make the guy leave but that I found out I liked). I just read. I also read a lot of fiction, both contemporary and older.

I remember the day I got caught up in the book Babbit, but Sinclair Lewis. We had to read it for English class, I guess tenth grade maybe, but it, as books do, caught me. we were doing something else in class, and I was reading it secretly under the desk, like a guy would do a Playboy or something.

My teacher saw me reading secretly and came up and said, Well, Mr Cliver, what are you reading. She reached in and pulled out – Babbit. She didn’t know what to do. It is rare that a teacher finds one of her student reading “good literature” on his own time. She stood there for a moment, then gave it back to me with a perplexed look on her face and said Read it later, please.

I suppose the reading made me want, sooner or later, to write. I want to write something that someone will have trouble putting down. And while I enjoy writing for this blog, I would like to write something that was for a wider audience.

I have to admit, I know when I write something that is good. And I know when I write gibberish. Occasionally I will write something that I know has merit and I usually put those in a different file.

But a writer has to be also a reader. How in the world can you do something if you do not know what it looks like when you get finished?

my 750th post

But, my child, let me give you some further advice: Be careful, for writing books is endless, and much study wears you out. (Ecclesiastes 12:12)

This is my 750th post. Not counting this post, I have written 329,777 words.

There is a quote that I always thought funny.  Apparently Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, in 1781, upon receiving the second (or third, or possibly both) volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from the author Edward Gibbon, said: “Another damned thick book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?”

I have never heard of Prince William Henry. But I have a copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in my library.

Some think a lot of writing is foolish. What purpose does it serve? What point does it make?

I am not sure and I am nor sure that anyone really reads all this. However, I have felt the need to write for a long time. With the advent of Blogspot, it has come to pass that I write.

And the more I write, the faster I write. I have found that I can write at typing speed. I read that about someone the other day, and it dawned on me that I do that. I always have, to a point and inasmuch as you can with one of those old manual typewriters.

And I find I like writing. 330,000 words is the same as four or five basic novels. Or two or three of those big sci-fi novels.

I also find that the more I write, the more I have to say. And oddly enough, I have had a scripture for each of them.

There are few if any comments on my blog, and I figure that I am writing stuff into the wind. But I feel the need to write. And will continue.

I  hope it has been good stuff I wrote. And that God has been glorified.