Is that “Remiss-age”? I have to beg forgiveness, but every 122 weeks or so, I need the freedom to miss a “Random Acts of Linkage” post. I’d cobble one together even now (a little late, but better than never, right?) except I’ve don so little reading this week that there still wouldn’t be much to link… barely enough to make a post of, in fact. But I do have some random thoughts.

When I began this blog, I assumed that if any number of people read this blog, my actual identity would eventually come out publicly. Of course, I’ve been blogging all along — some 4½ years and almost 3,000 posts ago — under the pseudonym of “Brother Maynard.” When I began blogging here, I said that “the names are being withheld to protect the innocent and show grace toward the guilty.” I thought after the first year that I would announce myself, but on the advice of a few friends, I never have. But maybe I’m no longer feeling gracious.

I think my blogging mojo must have got up and went. Like I said, my blogging frequency has dropped a bit over the past several weeks so that I’m no longer hitting my daily quota. I realized this morning that I only had one post separating my weekend posts, and yesterday I fizzled on my regular hymn series. I started writing the post this morning, but partway through I decided to hold it for next Sunday rather than publish it right away. It’s part of my Sunday series after all, and this isn’t Sunday. Saturday’s linkage was a bit lighter than usual as well, as I headed outdoors to get some work done in the yard. The new fence looks great by the way — thanks for asking.

Because I enjoy Sara’s posts, even if she’s no longer putting them on Missional Tribe… because it’s about the voice first, and hers should be heard. But that’s incidental.

Monday morning after logging my menu selection and discussing Bosnia with my waitress, I began to dig into Reggie McNeal’s Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church. I’ve not had much time with it this week, so I’ve only ingested the introduction and chapter one… but I found myself jotting down an inordinate number of notes and quotes for so brief a sample, and yesterday when I tweeted “Those who miss the missional renaissance will find themselves rendered irrelevant to the movement of God in the world. — Reggie McNeal” it proved to be good retweet material. (Paraphrased from p.17 for the sake of a 140-character limit.)

There’s been something of a general malaise going around lately… people tired with blogging, tired with the emerging church, tired with missional, or tired with “the conversation.” People accuse these conversations of being the “same old, same old” or a number of other things, including being exclusive or exclusionary or being made up of people who only talk and don’t ever do the things they talk about. Perhaps you can call to mind a recent post or two or five that runs along these lines — I know I can. I’m not linking them because I’m not specifically responding to them… I’ve had similar conversations and emails and read comments along these lines as well. And of the posts we can both call to mind, there are some folk who I highly respect and who (ironically?) are an important part of the conversation… even if they tire of it at times. And some of what they say in these posts is correct. On the other hand, one reply in a group email thread this past week discussing this phenomenon said simply:

I seem to be in the midst of a technology update. It started with replacing my Treo 650 with a shiny new HTC Touch Diamond. I have to say I like the calendar and the email app on the Treo better than the HTC, but the Treo lacks about 83 of the features on the HTC even though it has a much more functional keypad. Or it could be 84 features. Anyway, now I have the task of transferring everything over. I hate the transition where I have half my data in each place and have to carry two devices as a result.

Over the past 4+ years, I think only two or three days have gone by where I haven’t posted. That’s a pretty good record — but not perfect. When that much time passes and I haven’t posted, I feel I’m neglecting the blog, and if I let one or two days go by, it’d be easy to let a week go by without posting. On the other hand, I’m trying to say things actually worth reading rather than posting just for the sake of typing practice.

Looks like I got accepted as a 9rules member. I forgot I had applied to the network back in November, but am happy to be in.

9rules is a collection of blogs representing good writing in a variety of categories. As they put it, “We find the best content from the independent web and pull it all together in one location.” And the 9 rules? Those are:

I’ve upgraded my WordPress install from 2.2.3 right up to 2.7 now, including updates to several plugins and a few plugin changes as well (add this, drop that). Turns out I had an improper MySQL query, and the changes I’ve made seems to have overwritten it. Like the shoemaker’s son who wanders around town in the worst shoes of all, I keep falling behind in the updates to my own website. Kind of embarrassing how long I let it slip because of some necessary database changes that I wanted to avoid. I won’t be doing that again.