Blogging.

A lot of my thought life is spent dreaming. Too much of it I think. I imagine myself composing that perfect song, with lyrics that are just vague enough to resonate with everyone and just bold enough to bring glory to Christ and turn the hearts of men towards their creator. I dream of writing free lance in my "spare time" for prestigious magazines and newspapers. And yet, almost daily I sit down to write... and nothing. I have no world changing ideas, no profound lyrics, nor even the ability to properly articulate in writing the few lame ideas I do have. And it is for precisely these reasons that I am an amateur. And it is a truth I'm slowly learning, and slowly overcoming.

I've heard it worded before that the difference between a professional and a novice is that a novice will wait for inspiration to strike, while a professional is noticeably worn down from the immense time they have spent hashing out even the most obscure and seemingly insufficient ideas. It is easy for me to read incredible quotes from some of my favorite authors and think to myself, "what simple genius" as if these authors sat down one day and wrote one sentence that perfectly explained what they hoped to convey. In reality, the quotes we hear daily are the culmination of hours upon days, upon months and even years of time. "Brilliant" quotes have never originated as a quote. No one writes a book or a speech with only a sentence. These quotes are actually but a small part of something much bigger. They are the part of some person's simple idea that has been re-articulated over and over and over in desperate hope that something they write or say is comprehensible. No one who has ever written something that has held great impact ever sat down one day and said, "today I'll write something brilliant." Even those who have a knack for writing the profound do so not by explaining things better, but by explaining things less. It is the simply and slight ambiguity of great authors that allows a writing to resound with the multitudes.

And so it is with these things in mind that I've changed the title of my blog. Nonillion is an unnecessarily large number with too many zeros. It isn't a practical number at all. I'm never going to have to subtract $3.75 for a cup of coffee and a nonillion in order to recount my last bank statement. And yet for whatever reason, I like the number. Maybe because it's fun to say. Maybe because I enjoy the irony that a useless number would start with the prefix 'non'. Maybe because numbers have always held special interest to me. For whatever the reason, the number nonillion is something I've thought about (specifically in the kitchen one day while chatting with Drew). I don't expect it to be something that many people have pondered or even care about, but it is something that has found its way into my thoughts. And in such a manner will this blog be. I'll force myself to write about the silly and weird things I conjure up from the depths of my consciousness if only because I like to write. I don't expect anything I write about to be brilliant or life changing or something that the world needs to hear, but maybe, one of these days, I'll hash-out an idea just enough or share a life experience that someone somewhere could find common ground with. And maybe every once in a while God will use my weak writings to reveal just a bit of his glory. That's my only hope. To write and to glorify God. That's why I'm going to blog.