Why this? Why here? Why now?

I love to write.

I mainly love to write about sports or traveling somewhere and what to do, where to eat and where to stay when you get there. Those are passions of mine.

But, as passionate as I am about those things — and nicely as people appear to respond to them — there is nothing really profound or life-changing in the stuff I usually write about.  It’s not going to have a lasting impact on anyone or leave a lasting legacy for someone to latch onto.

And I want to leave something to latch onto…

Especially for my four children. They, along with their mom, are my other real passion in life.  I want to see them have the very best of everything.  I want them to experience success in their lives.  I want them to be loved and respected by anyone and everyone they meet.

But most of all, I want them to develop a faith in Jesus Christ that sustains them when the ‘very best’ things are beyond their reach or failure seems to come instead of success and no one seems to care or respect them.

So, on this day after Father’s Day, I feel compelled to begin this new blog with some random musings about what I think it means to be a Christian…a believer in Jesus Christ…and how it affects and motivates me from day to day.  And I do it with the hope that they will see it and either find encouragement in it if or when they face some similar situations in their lifetimes or benefit from reading about my mistakes and avoid making the same ones down the road.

The thoughts will be random…although I doubt anything in our lives is actually random.  But there won’t be an agenda — or at least there won’t be my agenda.  There won’t be faux piety.  My life is full of shortcomings and I won’t just post when I feel like I’ve got something masterful and pious to say.

The thoughts will be rudimentary.  I felt pretty secure in the fact that I knew what that word meant when I chose it as part of the name of this blog, but I looked it up to be sure.  It means, “being in the earliest stages of development; basic”.  I’m a basic kind of guy — not too deep — and most of my thoughts never get past the earliest stages of development.  On top of that, the older I get the more I understand that I don’t really know that much about anything.  So for me to pretend that anything other than rudimentary thoughts will be posted here would be disingenuous.

The thoughts will be about faith.  I always imagined that I’d marry a woman who was strong in THE faith (I did, by the way) and that we’d naturally — through osmosis — have a family of kids who would also be strong in the faith.  But the osmosis thing doesn’t always work out and people — even the closest ones to you — can’t always tell what you believe until or unless you make it known to them.  This won’t be a substitute for me sitting down face-to-face with them to share what I believe and why, but it can be a good supplement.

And finally, it’ll be about stuff.  Because life is made up of stuff.

So we’ll see how this goes…me and my little faith blog.

Guys (D, S, K, T and H)…I hope it helps us all grow.