Rookie Mistake.

Those of you who subscribe to the 4thDaveBlog feed may have seen something unusual in your inbox yesterday: a new 4DB post that immediately disappeared from the blog. There’s a reason for that.

Yesterday afternoon, I wrote a post about how Christians react to criticism of religious art, and I got a bit snarky. I meant to save it as a draft but hit publish by mistake; I realized what happened immediately and pulled it back down. Unfortunately, WordPress had already sent out notices of the new post. Ugh. Talk about not-ready-for-primetime.

What’s worse: the post just wasn’t good. I realized this as I reread it. The topic is worth discussing (and I will do so next month in a series of posts about Christians and art), but the way I discussed it was not useful.

I want to be precise here: I am not saying sarcasm or criticism isn’t useful. They can be both edifying and necessary. But what I wrote was really just snark for snark’s sake, which only serves to try to make me sound clever.

My main goal with this blog is to write what is beneficial for the reader, whether that be encouragement or critique. The useful critiques of that post got lost in a swamp of nyah-nyah. So I pulled it, though not quickly enough.

I’m gonna come clean, gang: the spike in readership this week (thanks to some really kind comments and links) both thrilled me and freaked me out. With this boost in traffic comes a reminder that my words have an impact, no matter who I am. They land somewhere. Whether spoken or printed, my speech is the overflow of my heart and a representative to others of my character. Every careless word I speak, blog, or tweet will be judged by God and others. I’ve even been blessed with a ministry involving words, and by the grace of God, the things I say carry a bit of weight, even if only in my church family.

As my beloved wife said to me this week, “Time to step it up.” And so it is. I’ve been given an opportunity here. I want it to count.

For those of you who are new readers, I post on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so you should check back then. You can also subscribe as others have, though you shouldn’t expect any more unfinished drafts to be sent out. Lesson learned; I’ll be writing posts in a Word document first, before posting anything onto the Wordpress site.

FYI: I’ll have another #SufficientFire post that will go live this afternoon. Thanks for sticking around.