Older Posts

Looking for things to write about, I started looking through some of my older blog posts, the ones that I posted shortly after returning home from my mission. These posts are found in May, June, and July of 2011 and March of 2012. A few of them were pretty good: Happy Father's Day, Battle for Freedom, To Generate Spiritual Light, Seek the Higher Ground, The Practical Use of Talents. It's ironic that after I wrote about the practical use of talents, in which I said that I could use my talent for writing to build up the Kingdom of God by maintaining a spiritual blog, I didn't blog again for almost a full year. I'm grateful for the commitment I made to blog every day. I know there'd have been a few days I'd have missed if it wasn't for that. And once I stopped blogging, it'd be harder to start again. But now that I've been blogging every day for a few months, it's been getting easier. The hardest part now is finding things to write about.

A theme for my blog has always been the armor of god, and the spiritual warfare for our souls. That makes sense, given the name of the blog. Another theme I keep coming back to is light, especially as an analogy for spiritual light. I've talked about generating light, maintaining it, the fact that it sometimes grows slower than we'd like, and the strength it has to repel darkness.

I've also talked, once or twice, about the idea of having a theme for this blog, like bridging the gap between spiritual concepts and physical activities. I always thought it was a good idea to have a set theme, except for when I found out that that doesn't work. Whenever I set a theme, I stopped blogging for a while. I don't want that to happen now.

So, far, I've been writing for months without a theme, and it's been going fairly well. I've even been forming a few themes naturally, just by writing about what I've been thinking about, and by continually thinking about the same kinds of things, like armor and light. And the more I've been blogging about them, the more I've been thinking about them, which I'm sure has been good for me.

We are in a spiritual war, and the more we remind ourselves of that, the more faithful we'll be motivated to be. I said in one of those older posts that there was a quote going around, "Life isn't a cruise ship, it's a battleship. If you're not being shot at, be grateful for that." And I mentioned wanting to change the second sentence to, "If you think you're not being shot at, check again." The enemy is terribly subtle. If we're not watchful, we may find that we're being spiritually weakened without our knowledge.

That's why God wants me to blog. Sure, it sometimes helps the people who read my blog, but it also helps to keep these things on my mind, too. I need this blog as much as anyone does. Man, God sure knew what He was doing when He asked me to start a daily blog.