So, I'm laying here on the couch with an uncomfortable stomach ailment, with little that I'm able to do but think, and I realize that I've written you next to nothing in the past to months. And I don't just mean on this blog; I mean in e-mails, prayer requests and cute little videos, too.
(Un)fortunately, it's not just because I'm lazy or busy, but because I have this newfound fear of sounding self-important (which I'm likely violating just by writing about it). I first noticed it during my first summer back home after I'd been in college. After spending nine months speaking in pompous, collegiate accents regarding only the most prodigious of matters, I came home, and people just couldn't understand me. My older brother first told me off for my big vocabulary, but I thought nothing of it (that's what older brothers are for). But then, a couple days later, I was talking to some ten-year-old, and he told me that I talked funny, that he couldn't understand me.
It's really haunted me since then. And it's sad. And now that I'm working for Wycliffe here in Cameroon, I want to share with everyone what's going on in my life. But, well, Christians can tend to put missionaries up on pedestals to start with; that last thing I need is to put myself up there by talking fancy. I was trying to write my first prayer letter like two months ago, and the big thing that came through when my friend Abar reviewed it for me was that I was talking (and by that I mean writing) oddly and unnaturally.
That's what I'm trying to cure myself of. Hopefully, but wasting a post and five minutes of your time to vent, I have cured myself of my fears and of my language problems, and I can now write about stuff like I really want to.
Who knows, maybe next time my writing style shifts to what I'd use for a college essay, folks will just wave it off because they realize that I have "issues" and they've come to terms with that.
There. It's done.