a change

I have long been desiring a new blog.

Not because I haven't loved posting here all this long time. As the years have wended themselves away, through crisis and quiet, through babies and exhaustion, always in the church, always with a big pile of laundry and a sink full of dishes, I have lived here working out my salvation with fear and trembling. Looking back through eight years of posts there are some bright moments and some funny hysteria but really this has been the mundane recording of ordinary time. It is here that I got into the habit of writing, both the discipline and the glory. Of all the things in my life, blogging has become a true place of pure uncluttered enjoyment. It has never been a chore, never a trial. It has been a 'duty' I imposed on myself for 'fun'. 

And every year I've become a little more hostile to blogger and a little less hostile about everything else. Why, many have wondered, is her blog called An Undercurrent of Hostility? She seems nice, if overly sarcastic. What is she hostile about? And is it really an undercurrent? 

Well, when I started writing here I grasped about for a name for a blog. It was a new thing. I wanted in. And I come from a large extended family where sometimes, in-spite of all the love, my father used to say 'you could cut the undercurrent of hostility with a knife'. So, I thought, that's a great name. I love being hostile. And I had so many things to be hostile about--the apostasy of TEC, our being sued and losing our building and moving home and church in a bleak mid winter, a culture that is becoming more and more coarse and violent and broken. And I was occasionally hostile about sin, both in myself and in the world. I could go on listing all the various undercurrents of hostility for a while.

But I tried not to, in all my writing here. More and more I didn't want the hostility to be the Main Thing. I wanted to keep track of the funny and ridiculous, of various ordinary miracles that sorted out and ordered our lives, of what interesting things God was saying to me in his word. I wanted always to be writing something, even when I should have been doing other more important things.

And then, a long while ago, Matt and I thought, suddenly at the same time, that it would be awfully nice to blog together. We do everything else together--house, children, church, cooking, everything--why not blogging. And so after thinking about it for a year and then messing about with platforms and thinking all the time about a new name, last week jumped in and bought a domain name and I accidentally moved all my archives over. We're finding our way around a new space, a more complicated space, but a much much cooler space than blogger ever allowed.

The new name is Preventing Grace (preventingrace.com). We try to prevent God, all the time, from doing his will and arranging things in the best way, but God's Preventing, as in Going Before, Grace, leads and guides us. We say Prevenient now for grace, what with language always changing and moving along, but I like the old word working along with the new word. God's Preventing Grace is stronger than our preventing him. 

I'm sure there will still be an undercurrent of hostility here and there. I'm sure you will be able to find it. But it's not the Main Thing. I hope and beg you'll follow me over to Preventing Grace and comment and book mark and come along for a new chapter, another decade of Ordinary Life with God's Preventing Grace.