SC are you with me?

This blog is a shout-out to the important people in my life back in Columbia, South Carolina. {I am assuming that there are still about 4-5 of you that may stumble over here from time to time.}

My earliest bloggings were written almost entirely with my SC backdrop in mind. I was naively eager to publish my new discoveries, not only for my own "ownership" of change, but also to challenge a few friends and young adults to jump down the rabbit hole with me.

This inevitably caused some of my SC companions to feel uncomfortable. Thus I entered a (long) period of really lame blogging -- writing only about things that were "safe" and uncontroversial, and being hyper-sensitive to how a variety of folks may interpret my words. I began to lose readership (back then I would occassionally check my blog tracking stats), probably because there wasn't anything worth reading and people could sniff my lack of vulnerability.

Then, disgusted with my dilemma and cowardice, I purposefully jumped around on the blogosphere a few times in order to (hopefully) cause the weak-stomached people in my past to lose my scent. Thus, pulmones was born with a fresh desire to be my whole self as much as possible. Even more importantly, I wanted to find a way to speak about things such that the hardlined emphasis on "insider Christians" and "outsider nonChristians" was basically ignored.

While this has been a good exercise for me personally, it seems that the notion of bringing all of my friends together in one space hasn't really worked. No worries.

I do, however (and this was the original reason for the post), wish to offer my apologies to those few readers that can by proxy represent my South Carolina milieu. If any of you have felt completely broadsided by all the recent talk of beer, please forgive me. I haven't forgotten you; nor have I lost my faith in Jesus or the baptist way of seeing Him. And I don't mean to belittle your reality with such bold descriptions of a part of my life that has gone from "godless tabboo" to "God-redeemed possibility." Altough I had to briefly turn off my hyper-sensitivity to you in this regard, I did not do so without conscious effort.

Would you, remnant SC reader, please pass along my love and gratitude to those who may have looked the other way somewhere along the way?

Grace and Peace,

Greg