Last blog post

It's time for me to let the Paragraph Farm lie fallow. Hours of blogging before and after work, as well as on lunch breaks, have taken too great a toll on many other things I should be doing, such as helping my wife.

It makes no sense for me to write about theology while avoiding or giving short shrift to the full measure of Christian service that is properly mine as a husband and father. Moreover, the car accident that my daughter Jane and I were in last summer continues to affect daily life for our entire family. Jane was most traumatically injured and still suffers from often-debilitating head pain. Son Thomas's entrance into full-fledged puberty was complicated by jealousy over the attention that his little sister needed so much of and still gets. Cathleen lost a significant amount of work time while tending last summer to Jane and more recently to lingering medical and insurance paperwork, on top of all else she does to run the household.

As for me, bad habits I had even before the accident were aggravated by it. I'm ashamed to admit that I concentrated on working and blogging rather than family life because the my job and this blog were familiar and -- unlike that horrific accident and its aftermath-- controllable.

But I've come to realize that even if he's taking a sledge hammer to American foundations, what the president does matters less than whether I install window screens without help, make sure that we have adequate insurance, and guide precious children while they are still malleable.

I have faults that urgently need to be addressed, so I'm shelving this digital farm in order to address them properly. "Orthopraxis" matters as much as "orthodoxy."

If you've been a regular reader, you have my heartfelt thanks. If you were a friend, you still are. And if you pray, please pray for us. These are hard but hopeful times.