I've learned how to laugh and I've learned how to pray
I was told this week that I have a hobby blog. I got the distinct impression that in that context, “hobby” meant “not read by anybody”.
Which I already knew — I see the stats after all. Yes, that’s a slight exaggeration, it is read by someone (hi, Mom!), but speaking in broad generalities it’s mostly true.
But that triggered the conversation in my head again about whether that’s OK. And then my bill for the website came in yesterday, and I had to think about it again.
I’m told I learned to read at three-and-a-half while sitting on my grandfather’s lap while he read the comics to me. I obviously don’t have any memories of that, but, like most of us, neither do I have any memories of not being able to read. Unlike many (most?) of us, however, I don’t have any memories of not wanting to read.
As an elementary child, I lived less than a mile away from a library. The library had a ten book at a time limit, which I discovered by trying to exceed it. I read just about anything I could lay my hands on; kid-sized biographies of two babes (Ruth and Didrikson) and countless others, all of the Nancy Drew’s that existed at the time (forget the Hardy Boys, I was far more interested in the 18-year old female detective), the random book on fractions,1 and book after book after book after book on World War II.
1979 was a pretty good year for the Yale University School of Drama. One of their graduates starred opposite Dustin Hoffman in the year’s top-grossing film, a family drama about the breakup of a family. Meryl Streep, class of ’75, would eventually win an Oscar for her performance in Kramer vs Kramer, one of several that now grace her home (although she almost lost that first one, leaving it in the bathroom at the Oscar ceremonies).
The other graduate was in another top-10 box office hit, a science fiction movie not named Star Trek that was still one of the most hotly anticipated movies of the year.
I ran across this statement recently:
“The greatest danger of television and movies is helping (us) to grow accustomed to the enjoyment of the absence of God.”
I’ve pondered that for a couple of weeks. I generally agree with the sentiment: we need to be careful about what we intake, and a lot of our intake these days is television and movies. (Note the absence of books, probably for a couple of reasons: one, it’s possible to find books that aren’t absent God, and two, who reads books anymore?) But there are couple of implications that I’d like to tackle.
Just a quick site administration note. I’ve setup secure hosting for Broken & Saved, which means you should get here with https://www.brokenandsaved.com instead of plain http://www.brokenandsaved.com. The site will automatically redirect you to https if you use forget and use http, but it would be good to update your bookmarks to the site to add the s after http.1
You will (should?) not notice any difference at all. The only difference is that the communication between your web browser and the web site itself is now encrypted, and you have assurance that when you specify this site in your browser, it’s really this site that comes up.