Read this. Or don't. I don't care. No, wait...

It's time to start blogging again.  Or at least, that's what I told myself when I got up yesterday.  A two-year hiatus from this blog is long enough, and by golly, there just aren't enough blogs in the world.  And besides, it's a good excuse to put off going to Ikea for those cheap, umlaut-infested wooden shelving units I need for the pantry.

In preparation for my re-entry into the blogosphere, I looked back on my very first blog entry, which I posted about four years ago.  It begins with the same self-deprecating statement that all new bloggers are required to say:  "I'm writing this blog simply for the sake of writing.  I don't really care if it's any good or whether anyone ever reads it."

Of course it was a lie.  I bloody well did care if anyone read it.  If I just wanted to store unread documents online, there's Google Drive for that.  So over the next couple years I posted a couple dozen entries.  And none of them...not a single one of them even got a nomination for a Pulitzer.  No book deals.  Not so much as an invitation from a major magazine to become a regular contributor.

The bulk of my day-to-day work has me dabbling in a lot of different communication arenas, everything from film editing to TV production to web and graphic design.  But writing is what I love most, and what I do least.  So why does it seem so hard to maintain any sort of consistency in blogging?  Yes, it could be argued that life gets in the way, days get busy.  But somehow I always seem to have time to watch Survivor and Walking Dead and Downton Abbey.  And let's not forget Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.  Nothing like Triple-D to make my own kitchen look pretty dismal.

For the longest time I feared that I had nothing of any real value to say, and so merely the act of starting a blog was, at best, presumptuous.  And yeah, I know what they say about this mass infestation of personal blogs being symptomatic of our society's increasing bent toward narcissism.

But as I ponder it more, I think the real thing holding me back is not so much a fear that I don't have anything to say, or a fear of giving into narcissism, but rather, the fear of actually writing down those things that I think are worth writing down.

When I started this blog, I had all sorts of expectations about writing my observations and experiences of being an evangelical Christian in a Mormon-dominated culture.  Hence the title of my blog, "Among the Saints."  But that hasn't really materialized to any significant degree, at least not to date.  It's not that I'm afraid of that subject matter.  After all, the topic of Mormonism vis a vis Christianity features pretty heavily in my vocational work.

But the question I'm mulling over is, what is really worth writing about?  I suspect that the only thing that has a chance of un-sticking the rusty wheels of this abandoned blog is a willingness to write about what I'm afraid to write about.  And there are plenty of things on that list.

So...am I going to rise to the challenge in the days and weeks ahead, or will my next entry be some sheepish posting two years from now?