Blog Problems

Here is the problem with blogs: Blogs allow others to see the surface of our being and blogs are merely a medium for us to present the surface of our beings.

Here's the scary thing about blogs: Blogs are an accurate picture of who we imagine ourselves to be. That is, beings that are what we present ourselves to be and what others observe us be by their presentation. This is not a complement.

David Wells writes in Losing Our Virtue,
“Native born Americans have become psychological immigrants, as alone in our huge cities and complex bureaucracies as the foreign immigrants who came ashore in New York…In our great centers commerce, the cities, as well as in the thoroughfares of conversation like television and the movies, surface appearance take on a powerful, symbolic role and become commercially potent. Style is the “commerce in appearances.” It uses what is a surface either to transform or to hide the person.” (143)

Our virtual presentation of our lives through the medium of blogs is the creation in cyberspace (whatever that is) of what we think we are in reality. The two could not be farther from the truth. We are not what we present ourselves to be. We are not always what others observe our presentations to be. It is folly to believe that we are. Unfortunately, we do.

I realize that I am posting this on my blog, shared by my wife (really upheld by my wife, which maybe is the manifestation of her virtual function as my ‘suitable helper’? I must stop this digression…). Our blog’s title is a declaration of two of our activities. It could very well be that we think that we are what we do (surf or cook or anything else). We could be that we are presenting to others that we are what we do. We are not. We are who we worship. And if we think that we are what we do or own or feel or whatever then we are idolaters worshipping ourselves. In this sense, I repudiate the monikers that Melia is a chef or a homemaker and that I am a surfer or a pastor or whatever. This is not to rebel against labels but to oppose the religion of our society that believes that our identities are tied to ourselves. They are not. Our identities are tied in a permanent knot to our Creator whose image, despite our sin, we still bear.

Here is the declaration of our identities from our Maker Himself.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

We are the image bearers of God to the creation given authority over all the earth to use it for our lives and the enjoyment and worship of God.

So the ocean, wind, waves, and the natural resources used to make the various vehicles and equipment created by man to live in the world that we have been given is a minor and really insignificant aspect of the much greater enterprise of men to exercise their delegated place in the cosmos. So, this is what it means that ‘joe surfs.’

The labor and insight of humanity to harvest from this planet all sorts of spices, vegetables, and meats and then to combine them into amazing meals that function to serve the family at multiple layers of meaning and significance is the rightful execution of the grand and glorious plan of mankind for our Grand and Glorious God has given it to us. In this sense joe’s “wife cooks.”

Identity is not what your meals look like, what company made your tools, and from what producer you garnered your materials. Identity is in the God who made you for his purposes and commissioned you for his mission.

This should change the preparation of every meal and every session. And this should change everything else, too.

This is what is wrong with blogs at some level. But maybe you just use to communicate with the 6 friends you have who live in different places of the world. For you, be encouraged, joe’s wife will resume posting.

The Explanation

I am Joe. Average Joe as a matter of fact, or at least an average joe. I have wife and son (and desire even more kids). I have a job that is more important than riding a sliver of foam and fiberglass. I have a mortgage and private health insurance policy. I've been mortally sick. I'm for religion, namely mine. I am in my 30's. If I fall off the tax bracket I will not meet my deductible. I do the repairs to my home, not because I know how but because I have to. I'm very average. I do not own oceanfront property. I do not travel to exotic locations for surfing her waves. I do not have a personal trainer. I do not even have a membership to a gym. I do not have a sponsor for surfing nor have I ever. I did not grow up in San Diego or some other epicenter of surfing's origin or development and have no claim to native-born surfing rights. I was not taught to surf by my father or mother or brother or mystical water-living mammals. I slugged it out the ugly and embarrassing way - the hard way of learning alone and from inland and with my native, non-straining, anti-surfer accent. I'm average. So average that it has been work to even be average. But, I do happen to surf and enjoy surfing as much as any I've met. Which among those who really surf is still pretty average. I like surfing and surfboards. Not the clothes or language or idea of it as 'culture.' I don't care for the pluralistic ideology and generally inarticulate ethos of life and meaning of her icons, nor the rank and emotive hedonism that sells surfing (or at least its image). But I do like to ride the temporal swaths of water on pieces of foam and fiberglass. I like weather models and buoy readings and isobars. I like early mornings whether cold or hot, numb fingers or flesh rubbed raw from more than a hour surf for a one does not have more than an hour to surf. I like nasal drips at awkward times and the lingering smell of my wetsuit throughout the day after a morning session (which is at most once a week). I like the understanding and images of rockers, foils, vectors, cants, rakes, rails and tails.

Being an average joe, I like many things but a select number of them I like a quite a bit more than the others. Surfing and surfboards are one of them. While I hope not the chief among other desires and enjoyments but an enjoyment and a desire, for sure. I am Joe. A very average guy with responsibility other priorities of a higher value but who really likes to surf and thus surfboards.

This blog will just be what I do mentally anyway, record my evaluations of the surfboards I ride on the waves God blows my way when my other duties of a higher priority do not call. If you are average and you surf, I'm sure you will relate. Maybe I can pass along something only learned from the inland, duty-bound, wave-starved, quiver-poor, commuting, 30-something guy who still tries to surf as only a part of living life as it was meant to be.