Earlier this year, I made the decision to celebrate the fun moments in life. The milestones and the happy things that happen along the road of living. Not all of them happened like I planned.

• I forgot to celebrate my 13,000th day of life.
• I missed my 600th blog post
• I have yet to celebrate the birth of my new blog (it’s actually up and a link will appear here in a few days, once I have a new post for it).

I am a good husband and father, so I certainly remembered birthdays and our anniversary.

This anniversary did sneak up on me. I have been blogging with WordPress.com for 7 years as of today. Holy crap! That means that my first blog, over at blogger is even older than that!

This is the third incarnation of a blog I started in seminary. My first was called “Uncollusion”. The impetus of that first blog was to break away from secretive church. I loved the name, the vibe, the concept. I was very much rebelling against a way of being that was unhealthy and felt forced upon us. At the same time, I was not thrilled with the negative “un” in the name. That rather than rebel, I wanted to rebuild.

So I changed it. Twice.

Four years ago, I switched from uncollusion.wordpress.com to my name. I would mull over a clever name, then decide against it. I kept the domain name and rebranded the site with different names. I eventually settled on my name. Partly because this site has been very much my home for writing about the church and life. I’ve also been taking more pictures, and even writing poetry again.

The one thing that has always been true about this blog is that it has been a ministry. Even when it had my name on it or I was writing about myself or my kids or my church or my faith, it was ministry.

Even as I am in the process of building a second blog home: one that has a more directed focus to the structure of our faith and practice, this will continue to be my home. It is my CV, my social media center, my id, my favorite place to show off how beautiful my kids are, and my place for celebration and for challenge.

This is one celebration I didn’t want to miss, for this ministry has opened up the world of possibilities to me and I am grateful to WordPress for making that possible.