The Future of This Blog: Where ‘Confessions’ Are Going

Happy Monday! Thus begins my more intensive season of blogging on the fourfold themes of True Confessions, Whole-Health Journey, Book Revue & Freebies, and The Future. Today I want to preview a little bit of where Confessions will be going.

Childhood.

Yep, I plan to begin at the beginning, from my days as a precocious homeschooled geek; my formative years of Baptist and Pentecostal spiritual upbringing and my wonderful-yet-madcap family life. And the beginning of my love affair with comic books.

Teen Years

My transition from being homeschooled to public high school, and my transition from the Assemblies of God to PCA Presbyterianism was a time of identity-searching, metamorphosis, insecurity, childhood bad habits blossoming, my love of polemics, church power plays, and the beginnings of my self-identified sense of being a compiler, peace-maker, and spiritual synthesizer. Oh yes – and the first time my being ‘in love’ isn’t unrequited.

College Years

My immersion into small-town private liberal arts college with all its peculiarities; the discovery, in the same year, of both ‘house church’ and the Internet’s vast potential; the first rays of individuation; college romance (or the lack thereof); and the full genesis of my pathologies.

Early Adulthood

Bookstore retail! Epistemological doubt! Panic attacks! Marriage and madness! And the continuing development of my own, personal Jesus.

Approaching 30

Married with child, quixotic businessman, beautiful and failed attempts at community life, and my continuing descent into insanity. (Sense a theme here..?)

So in general, I plan to sketch my life – at times overviewing, at other times detailing (with Actual Written Artifacts from these different eras), my days – looking at some broad themes of humor, spiritual exuberance, and love; as well as the shadow-side of specific (and at first relatively minor) phobias mutating into full-blown anxiety issues, along with how I’ve dealt with them (or not). Laying myself out there like this – and how my spirituality, theology, and community praxis have transmorgified throughout this process – who no doubt open me up to a lot of criticism from drive-by third-party observers, heresy-hunters, and armchair psychologists. I am prepared for this. On the other hand, I am even more prepared for (and wide open to) the experiences and ideas of the vast majority of my readers, who have proven to be nothing less than kind, generous and surprisingly insightful over the years.

The journey will begin tomorrow, with a very contemporary conversation among three very different friends.

The Future, Through the Eyes of Childhood

As many of you know, I am enrolled in a most unique gradate program: A Masters in Strategic Foresight under Jay Gary. Yesterday began a new semester, and two new classes: LMSF 602, Survey of Futures Studies, and LMSF604, Systems Thinking. Both are shaping up to be awesome classes for navigating (and leading!) change in our postconventional world. For 602, we are encouraged this week to share our thoughts regarding our evolving views of “the future.” I’m going to share them with you, too.

My Childhood View of the Future

When I was a kid, I thought of the future often. Chalk it up to a love for science fiction, particularly time-travel stories. When I was ten years old, I celebrated the New Years switch from 1989 to 1990 with my parents and grandmother, at my grandma’s house. While I was sitting on the floor, playing with a New Years toy I had received, I tried to imagine—in detail—what my future would be ten years hence. I would be 20, I thought…it would be the year 2000. I can’t say it was a very astute prediction: In my mind’s eye, I was still celebrating New Years with mom, dad, and grandma.

I was raised in a very spiritually attuned household, which for me meant happy Baptist-then-Pentecostal fundamentalists. So whatever thoughts I had on a day-to-day basis of the future informed by speculation like the above, or taking the long view of macro-history (inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series) was somewhat schizophrenically fractured in my mind by the sense that Jesus was going to come busting through some clouds at any moment. “They’ll Call You Gone,” was a rapture T-Shirt I owned as a kid. When I was about 11, a lady in my church stood up and said “The Lord told me that Jesus is coming back before my grandmother dies,” which was met by applause and approval by the pastor. And every sermon, Sunday School lesson, and Youth Group bible study reinforced this dominant picture of the future: “Jesus is coming soon, so the best way of preparation for the future is to make sure you’re in God’s good graces, and getting as many other souls saved as possible.”