Thursday, September 1, 2011

It's Been A While, but at Least I Am Not a Hack

Since I last blogged Osama Bin Laden has been killed.  Dirk Nowitzki won an NBA championship.  The NFL settled a labor dispute.  My son graduated Elementary School and started Middle School.  I have had three jobs (I am really enjoying the new one by the way) and a ton of blogging ideas.  Why have I not brought it to you good people?  That is a short story that I will make undoubtedly longer than is needed.

So, a little back story on me for a moment.

For fun I used to do stand-up comedy.  If there is one thing I hate it is getting sick, but if there are two things I hate, it is a hack.  A hack steals other people's bits and then uses them as their own without any real passion and by proxy makes the original bit come off as stale.  I can't stand to see a comic go up to the stage and do other people's material.  Comedy is hard.  For every George Carlin that has 20 hours of original material, there are 1000's of local guys across the country that survive on the same 15 or 30 minutes that they have been doing for 10 years.  I made an early proclamation that I would not be a joke thief.  Since then I have tried to be somewhat original.  I know that I am influenced by the things around me and that can often shape the cadence of my speech and the integrity of my ideas, but I work to arrive at notions through my own process.

Why did you make us read that last paragraph, Eric?  I did so because I didn't blog on many things because the ideas I had were getting written or preached around me, and the last thing I wanted to appear to be was a HACK.  Example?  I am glad you asked (although undoubtedly you are sad now that you have).

I wanted to start talking about the 10 commandments, but I wanted to tackle it from the side of saying these rules provide freedom.  Illustrating that anytime rules are broken, bondage is sure to follow, but I found out that my Pastor was preaching on the same thing.  I didn't want it to appear that I was stealing his material so I sat on my thoughts.  I didn't want to be a hack.

Several times things like this has happened to me.  I want to talk about money, guess what the current series at Church is?  I want to post something about pop culture and I find it was just written about on Grantland.

Today it dawned on me.  Who cares if I feel inspired to write something guess what?  I should just write it.  Inspiration comes to all of us and if we are honest many times we have similar thoughts but they are delivered differently.  We should all risk being a little hacky from time to time.  If you look at your communities the same problems that existed ten years ago are still there, but only now they are a little worse.  Drugs got cheaper.  Families get split up more.  Abortions got more prevalent.  Children get parented less.  People get deeper in debt.  Foods got more fattening.  We all got more lazy.

When one of us is sharing our message it is good.  When all of us are sharing our message it is better.  When we all starting sharing and living out the message it brings change.

I know it brings change because when all of the drug addicts and alcoholics tell people about their message and they live the lifestyle that is in harmony with that, we get more addicts and drunks.  Same with debtors, homosexuals, and the obese.  Is the message that you say in accord with the way you live, or are you even sharing that message you have?

Too many times we are guilty by our silence.  We speak our minds about everything else, but we forget to speak about what is most important.  I allowed my small platform here to be vacated for fear that I would sound like someone else.  No more.

I will be here to ramble about what I am inspired to talk about far more often.

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