I have to apologize for my extended hiatus from the blogosphere. It’s been several months since I last put my thoughts out here. And I could say that it’s because family life got so busy or because I had too much going on at the office. Both of those things are true, but the real reason is – it stopped being fun.

When I started blogging a couple of years ago, I was excited. It was really refreshing to find an outlet for the thoughts and strategies that I felt like God had placed inside of me. It felt useful to get them out on the web and to share them with others. And the feedback I got was overwhelmingly positive so it seemed like people were drawing definite value from them. Each week as I’d write, new ideas would come. For the most part.

From time to time, I would find myself in a place where I didn’t feel like I had anything to say. Usually when I was busy with work or family stuff. I would skip a week here and there, but for the most part, I was able to keep the weekly pace. I was generally pleased with how it was working.

But then I decided that I wanted it to be even more effective. I wanted to incorporate some of the techniques that I saw other bloggers doing – adding a picture, paying more attention to my stats, linking to other posts in ways that would drive my traffic up.

So I did. And for a little while, it worked. I got the buzz of additional results, more feedback; I was excited about trying these new techniques and becoming like a “really good blogger”. But then things changed. My need for feedback to make myself feel like what I was doing was valuable drove me to putting more and more effort into my posts. And all of a sudden, the blog became something I had to do each week, rather than something I looked forward to. And then it just wasn’t fun any more.

So I stopped. And it’s been almost 6 months since I wrote anything at all.

I want to go back. I want to go back to when blogging was fun. When I didn’t feel the pressure to get my word count just right, or to find a compelling image or to do whatever was necessary to get more clicks. As soon as I made the decision that this needed to be my next post, I have five ideas for more posts which will follow this one. I will write those over the next few weeks and post them here. And hopefully, they will be valuable to you or to someone. But I won’t be measuring my satisfaction with how many clicks I get. My measure will be – did I have fun doing it? Did I share the thing that I felt like needed to be shared?

I’m hoping that’s what you will find when you come back next time. I’m pretty sure that sharing what’s on my heart will be a lot more effective than not writing anything at all.