When I was a teen-ager, and into my twenties, I would write short-stories and poetry. In fact, the whole reason I moved to the town I currently live in was to finish a novel I had started. Even though I wasn’t asking the Lord for direction, He had a better path in store for me (meeting my wife) and my ‘career’ as a writer came to an end. So now, all these years later, I suddenly feel the need for an audience – people to know this part of me and to read my poetry which I had collected into an anthology called “Soul Ride”. I recently gave the anthology to a good friend of ours and she gave me lots of positive feedback which inspired me to go further. But, how was I to get it ‘out there’? Facebook didn’t work so I thought I could start a blog and use it to ‘publish’ my poetry.

A big concern I had with sharing this work came from the fact that when I wrote these poems I wasn’t serving Christ. Now, as a Christian, I do not and cannot endorse the subject matter and the lifestyle depicted in a lot of this work. Looking back from here, I can easily see the futility in the pursuits and the ‘searching’ I was engaged in. I now know that only God can make you complete.

Also, so many of the works speak of a desire for or a devotion to girls that may have crossed my path in the past. I can honestly say that no girl I saw, met or knew before I met my wife ended up meaning anything to me. I may as well have been writing about cars, grass or the wind. I was a romantic and I had a depth of feeling but, as profound as some of these declarations of ‘love’ may seem, the individuals that may have  inspired them were just tools for my need to write about something. Seeing rain may inspire you to open an umbrella and feel dry but you don’t personally relate to the rain – it doesn’t become an everyday part of your life and change you significantly as a person. As I met, fell in love with and married my wife, and as we began our life together, I began to realize that anything that came before was another thing entirely – something less.

So, I’m not the person I once was but I still feel strongly about the poetry I wrote. I like it and I think it’s good. I just feel like I’m ready for other people to read it.