When We Lost Kent St John, We Lost this Blog’s Biggest Fan–But It’s Time to Soldier On

Blogging is not for everyone. It’s hard to keep on doing this in my ninth year–the energy begins to drain away, and the number of readers goes down. It’s a cycle that’s hard to buck, and I’m trying now to be as invigorated as I was when I began this blog in November 2004.

In life, it’s all about the ups and downs, the ebb and flow is scary but that’s all that is predictable. That and loss.   When my biggest blog fan and good friend Kent St. John passed away on Thanksgiving day last year, it was  a blow. He was a guy who almost never, ever failed to post something on his blog every day.  Some times I would wince at bad grammar, or an egregious spelling error, (dinning was one of his favorite mistakes) but I always admired his determination to get something on the page every day. And he was a great commenter, today his comments still live on on both mine, Stephen Hartshorne and Sonja Stark’s blogs.

The hard thing is that you have to be excited and interested in sharing to post a blog.  Sad times don’t motivate writing, and when Kent was going down for the final count, it was obvious because he didn’t post.  For him to not post meant that he was too sad, too tired, too worn out fighting a disease that had ravaged him.  He had lost his fight.  I never met a guy who read more books than Kent, he’d load me up with a stack of non-fiction books he’d bought new at Barnes and Noble just about every time we’d meet.  He later moved to a Kindle but I’m sure kept up his voracious reading pace on the device.

We move along in this life and there’s nothing we can do to stop loss, heart ache, and pain. But when you commit to writing a blog, you have to stick to it, be faithful to your readers. I value the people who take the time to read what I write here and so I will soldier on, despite sometimes feeling depressed about loss, and not as inspired as I once was.  I need to reach a little further, regain my original zeal and give this platform its due. I am traveling on Saturday, flying to Bogota Colombia and then we’ll be seeing the coffee growing regions as well as the sparkling city of Cartagena. I will post every day when I am on this trip, getting back to my old groove.

Stick with me, dear readers, I will bounce back and continue to push this blog every day, not letting so much grass grow underneath my feet. I promise.