I couldn’t stay away.

Four years ago I announced the end of my blogging career. Blogs had run their course, and everyone was launching a podcast (mostly interviewing each other), while I still struggled to connect the Bluetooth in my car. I’d also just started the latest in a string of demanding jobs in which I once again stepped into a situation in need of massive change without the resources or expertise or education to make it happen. This was the third time in my career I’d done this without quite planning to, as if I’m Miss Marple who keeps being surprised to find herself in English country houses with poisoned guests, and it was a solid year before I had time to write anything besides emails.

The following year, I started a master’s degree in education in which I got to write about articles with titles like “The Effect of Mobile Browsing on the College Search Process” and “Public 2- and 4-Year Colleges’ Impact on Loan Debt.” I did not blog about these topics. You are welcome.

And also, after a decade of doing this every Tuesday and most Fridays, it just seemed like time to call it quits. The evangelical subculture, which I still very much fit into in those days, had some people who liked my stuff and plenty more who didn’t or didn’t read it. I was not going to get a book deal. I was not going to grow my “platform.” Ten years was enough.

Except what I’ve realized in that time, that time in which our oldest graduated from college and our youngest went to college and we moved from Philadelphia to Knoxville and I earned that master’s and also, I don’t know, watched our country become completely unhinged from reality, and watched the beginning of the end? the end of the beginning? of evangelicalism as we know it, and watched us endure a plague about as badly as a nation possibly could—what I realized is that some people process things by talking and some process them by thinking and I process life by writing. And there’s been a lot to process.

So I’m back, even if blogs are archaic and even if no one reads mine. I won’t write weekly, but I’ll shoot for monthly, or more often when there’s something I can only figure out by typing. If you’re here, thanks for reading.