July 2nd, 2012 by Kristi Stephens

I love order.

My mother loves to tell the story about when I was a kid and organized my closet carefully by clothing type, and then fashioned cardboard dividers to separate the hangers and labeled them – long sleeved shirts, short sleeved shirts, pants, dresses…

I still like to arrange my husband’s shirts in color wheel order in our closet.

Somehow, I am also a woefully scattered person who is almost always running late, rifling through a disorganized stack of papers and forgetting everything that is not attached to my person.

Last weekend at The Gospel Coalition conference, Sandra and I had breakfast with a group of bloggers.

I drank my unreasonably overpriced coffee and talked about blogging with the lovely women around me. Time and time again I tried, in vain, to answer the most common question posed to a blogger upon first acquaintance: “so, what’s your blog about?”

This should not be a hard question.

I want to point to the carefully labeled dividers on my blog and say, “see – everything in its place.” But it’s not. My blogging has evolved over time, encompassing a wide array of ideas and emphasizing various topics at different stages. As I wrestled to answer this question, I felt like I was digging through those chaotic piles of papers and struggling to find what I was looking for. Lately, my writing has just about ground to a halt as other demands on my time have clamored for attention.

The weightiness of most of my writing in the past demanded more time than I could give it. I began feeling burdened about how to write something that you want to read in a way that I want to write it; how to write something of importance with accuracy and pithiness. There are many things I long to write about that I just am not sure you want to read about, things that I don’t know how to fit into those cardboard dividers. There’s no defined place for them, so they just haven’t been written down! But I miss it. My dormant blog calls to me even as I scrub dishes and dream of all the things I want to write about, playing with words and ideas in my head.

I should rename my blog IdentityCrisis.com.

I want to take my blog back. I want to write about whatever flits across my mind. It might include women’s ministry and church life, or homeschooling, or living with a Christian worldview, or understanding and applying Scripture, or the current fight against modern day slavery, or adoption, or foster children, or responding in Christian love to worldwide humanitarian crises, or what it means that I just can’t seem to get a handle on keeping our desk free of clutter.

I’m taking my blog back from its hibernation. I apologize in advance for the scattered nature of what is to come. There aren’t easy cardboard dividers, and I can’t seem to follow a writing schedule to save my life. I might post three times a week or three times a month.

I keep coming back to that question – what is my blog about? I guess just this: I’m an ordinary woman standing in awe of the extravagant grace of an extraordinary God – and asking Him to change the world, starting in my own heart and living room.

Can you identify with my blogging identity crisis? :)