Now that we are less than two weeks away from beginning our 30 (40) Days of Blogging, and as a part of this endeavor, the Preachers Institute will offer some help, suggestions, ideas, guidelines, and hopefully a few basic, default ideas for starting your blog. First, begin planning your 30-40 day blogging schedule. It need not be anything too formal, but it is an easy matter to take a few days off the Calendar which have some significance, and prepare a blog, or several days of blogging, in advance. Some examples of days like this might be;
- First day of Nativity Fast
- St. Matthew the Apostle (Nov. 16)
- Entrance of the Theotokos (Nov. 21)
- Thanksgiving Day
- St. Alypius the Stylite (Nov. 26 – I love the stylites!)
- St. Andrew (Nov. 30)
- Prophet Habakkuk (Dec. 2)
- St. Nicholas (Dec. 6)
- St. Daniel the Stylite (Dec. 11 – told you, I love these guys)
- St. Herman of Alaska (Dec. 13)
- Prophet Daniel (Dec. 17)
- St. Ignatuis of Antioch (Dec. 20)
This is just my list, but you see how it goes. Each of these days offers a significant lesson from Scripture, the Divine Services, or the lives of the Saints with which to speak to the meaning of the Nativity of Christ.
A day’s blogging can be as short as a paragraph – nay, as short as a quotation (!) or as long as their entire hagiography.
For me, the above represents almost half of a 30 blogging streak, and almost a third of a 40 blogging run. That’s a significant amount of ‘work’ that is hardly any work at all, yet still offers my readers – be they parishioners, inquirers, web surfers or fellow clergy – something of value, something with spiritual nutrition to take away for the day. Of course, the nice part of blogging is that this can be done in advance, and simply scheduled for automatic publication on the day and time you have selected (I’m speaking of a WordPress blog, as this is what I use, and recommend – thought they don’t pay me for the endorsement). In this way, you can get a significant amount of your blogging done before Nov. 15th!
If it is useful to you, try it out. In any event, you have the chance to write in advance about a multitude of saints, stories, morals and spiritual riches and prepare them for publication before we even begin our Blogging!
Whatever you decide to do, whatever you decide to write about, November 15th is coming.
Get your blog on.
Fr. John A. Peck is the priest of the St. George Church in Prescott, AZ, and is the Director of the Preachers Institute.
