My blog is officially 4 years old today.  After 400 of posts over the past 4 years, it has been fun to see how the blog has changed, grown, and become what it is today.  This blog wasn’t the first time I had blogged.  I had a livejournal back in the day and even blogged while I was an intern for a short season.  But four years ago, I decided to venture back into blogging.

Here was my first paragraph I wrote on rjgrune.com:

I’ve thought about blogging for a while now; I’ve struggled with the idea of why I’d do something like that, wondered if I’m arrogant to think that anyone would care what I have to think, and ultimately put my reservations aside and decided to go for it.  Since I have spent a lot of time trying to decide if I would blog, I figured I should share my thoughts going into it.

When I started blogging, I initially blogged primarily about youth ministry and technology, occasionally adding in some random theology posts.  At that point, I would’ve considered my blog primarily a youth ministry blog and also a way to promote some of my app development work.

I blogged because I wanted to, had no strategy, and slowly began to have people reading and interacting with what I wrote.

Now, four years later, this blog has grown up a little bit.  I’m still motivated by my love for writing and sharing my ideas.  And I still love the things that I have previously spent a ton of time blogging about.

The blog has matured as I have better understand what I’m blogging about.  And it has matured as the community that is involved here has grown.  This blog is all about theology for everyday life.  This shapes what I write, how I write it, and the new ideas and dreams I have for my writing.

I honestly believe that good theology is not reserved for the academics, pastors, and dead guys, but it is for the people living everyday life.  And as a leader who believes this, I do whatever I can to translate the ancient message of the Bible into the language of ordinary people.

This affects the way I write, the way I preach, and the way I talk about my faith in daily conversations.  It influences the eBooks that I share with subscribers.  And even the new podcast that I’m working on.  It’s all connected around this crazy idea that the core doctrines taught throughout scriptures should be translated into the language of ordinary people.

So this is just a way to say Happy Birthday to my own blog and to let you know, I’m going to try to keep working with this crazy idea that when ancient truths are translated into everyday language that it changes people’s lives.

In the words of the beloved Steve Jobs, “Here’s to the crazy ones.”