a not-so-eloquent farewell

Four years ago I was working with Alex at UAB while making plans to move my family from Birmingham to St. Louis to go to Covenant Seminary. Birmingham was the place where my first two children were born, where we, as a family, were first part of a church community, and where I was a coach of a softball team. I was going to miss my friends a great deal and I wanted a way to stay in touch with that world. My job at UAB was one of the more fun jobs I have had. The work was enjoyable, it was down town, and there was loads of free time.

I also had a lot of free time at my previous job (at BellSouth). It was there that I discovered blogs and began blogging myself. My first blog is now lost forever. I recognized early on that traffic was the key to discussion. I am embarrassed to say that I invented commentors for my posts on my first blog. I was hoping that the appearance of traffic and interest would encourage real people to join in. But those were still the early days of blogging and most people didn't know much about it (interestingly, I was reading a person's blog at the time, I don't remember how I found it, that turned out to be the blog of my now good friend, and sometimes commentor, Josh (jsa)). I started up a new blog a year later while at UAB and noticed that my old problem still existed. That is when I came up with the brilliant idea to make it a group blog. The community and discussion would be built right in.

I had great expectations for this endeavor in the summer of '04. Most of those expectations went out the window after a couple of months. But not in a bad way. The reality is that when you have five-or-so different people, with different personalities and visions, trying to share the same space you cannot predict or depend on what will happen. And I am glad for it. That is one of the great lessons I learned over the last four years here. It is a virtual world, but in some ways I learned how to live with people. I learned patience, tolerance, confrontation, encouragement, all things necessary to get along well in life. It wasn't always an easy lesson. There are many things I probably would have done differently in hind-sight, but that is the nature of growth so I don't begrudge my foolishness. Hopefully there are no hard feelings.

Along the way folks came and went, as posters and as commentors. We never had a huge crowd, but we had a good one. Before we left Birmingham I was just getting to know Alex, I knew Jeff a tiny bit, Jed was growing on me, and I had talked to Jason a few times. But through their comments here, and then posts, I feel like have gained true friends. In an effort to keep my old friends I made some new ones. Not too shabby.

So I kept some friends, made some friends, improved my writing, and figured some stuff out about interacting with people. I also learned about theology, politics, the Bible, landscape architecture, YouTube, and a multitude of other things. There have been many wasted hours spent on-line in this or that debate, many wasted energies thinking about or getting angry about one thing or another, but by-and-large mumblety-peg has been a profitable venture. I am grateful for it and for all who have devoted time to this project, both posters and commentors (apparently "commetors" is not a word, and neither is "commenters," I had to pick one).

Posts will cease at the end of the day today. I'm not sure what will happen to the site after that. It will probably remain viewable for a while, then, who knows? We are working on a new idea that will be somewhat different than this in format and vision. If that happens I'll put a link to it in the comments section of this post.

Thank you, everybody.

George