I’m coming back after a two year break and plan to continue on a weekdaily schedule.

God is good all the time, and despite the challenges of the pandemic these past two years have been marked by many blessings—and chief among those blessings has been meeting and marrying my wife! If you’re reading this, no matter the time or place, please pray for us.

I think Geoff Shullenberger is right that “masks and lockdowns are here for good,” but I’m glad that, at least for now, the last visible signs of the pandemic are nearly gone in Washington, DC. The last national mask mandates that remain in effect are on the airlines and public transit. The return to normalcy has made living in Washington worthwhile again, although courtship during the pandemic had its advantages: simple and frequent dates, clear District streets, and a nearly empty hike in Rock Creek Park, as a few experiences of this time.

The U.S. Supreme Court is again considering the issue of abortion, thanks to its choice to consider Mississippi’s law protecting human persons at the age of 15-weeks. We’ll all soon learn what sort of Supreme Court the Trump administration built, and whether new judicial sophistry will thwart America’s recovery of the human right to life. Whatever the decision, there will be lots of work to do.

When I started here in January 2015, I wrote about part of the reason I was starting this practice of daily and public posting:

[D]espite the internet’s pervasiveness, so much of what we write, share, and post seems to disappear into the ether even more quickly than what our parents or grandparents might’ve written with pen and paper. I’m writing in public simply because I think I have a responsibility to try to make use of the ubiquitous tools of our time and to try to set down in writing and for at least my own personal record, or family’s record, some of what I’m reading, or thinking, or experiencing.

I think about how much I wish I could learn about the day to day lives of my own older family members or ancestors—imagining what they would have blogged about life in a war or on the farm or coming here in the first place. We generally don’t have any of that, and given the platforms we have today, it feels right that we should make an effort to write in public.

I think “writing in public” is also worthwhile as a way to think aloud and share perspective and experience. There’s a lot that gets left unspoken in public. That’s as it should be. But I also think that before most substantive conversations happen in private, things first have to be thought through and brought out a bit and that even informal public writing can serve as a jumping off point for that. That’s also what I’m trying to do here.

What I wrote then remains true now and is why I’m back at it.