MaybeToday.org was spawned in a crucible that was formed by the convergence of a number of difficulties in my life, all of which were pressing on my available time in some way or another. In a typically Christian manner, I was trying to understand what God was asking of me – what His will was for my life in those circumstances. In short, I was looking for God to help me straighten things out.
Maybe it was my professional background at play, but, in retrospect, I can see that I saw this essentially as a prioritization and scheduling exercise – which consisted in large part of trying to ascertain if the time was right to begin my studies toward a Master of Theology from Franciscan University at Steubenville, via their distance learning program. The program itself has seemed like the right direction for me for a while, but the timing has been problematic – perhaps primarily because of health concerns over the past year, but also because of concerns about its potential to impact my family time and work commitment, as well as my availability for involvement in my parish community. The insight that came to me seemed a bit out of left field.
I was beginning another long commute home in a miserable winter rain storm, when the thought came to me that I really needed to do something right away about making a long-needed change in email hosting. For years, I’d been running my own Internet mail server as part of a fairly elaborate network of systems in my basement. Back when I was working as an IT Infrastructure consultant, it was sensible enough for me to be running my own pilot lab at home, but I’d lost that need – and the motivation to maintain it- a couple years ago, and it was becoming something of an albatross to me, wasting time and money while steadily becoming riskier for me to run.
For various reasons, my resolution was to procure a new professionally hosted domain, migrate, then shut down my old domain. I’d come up with a list of potential new domain names, but hadn’t done any serious planning. And as I sat slumped in my car at a red light in that rainstorm, thinking I really needed to do something about it right away, my initial reaction was: “that’s going to be a lot of work, and when I’m done, I’m going to want to build a web site for it, which will be even more work… yeah, maybe tomorrow…” Immediately, however, I replied to myself: “No, maybe today”.
Right then, I knew I had found, not only my new domain name, but a key to understanding what God was looking for from me (or offering me, if you prefer): not a web site, per se, but the impetus to stop wasting my time waiting for tomorrow, and to start living for today; to stop trying to become me, but to simply be me; to stop trying to understand God’s plan, but to just do whatever honestly seems to be the needful thing to do.
It’s not very obvious how starting a blog would have been the needful thing to do in that situation, but it has to do with the need to stop waiting for the stars to align, so to speak. A while back, I targeted today as the launch day for this site. So, in the spirit of taking each day for what it’s worth – despite feeling still quite unready – I’m considering maybetoday.org formally launched with this post. I still have a lot of work to do to achieve the baseline I set out to meet for launch, but I’ll just have to be satisfied with what I’ve done design-wise, and get to the content as I can.
If anyone comes around and reads this, welcome: feel free to look around, and to chat if you’re so inclined.
john, i recently completed listening to maddens audio cd the tiber and potomac and i have to say that although i feel well educated, this area of knowledge, especially the relationship of the roman republic and the subsequent empire to the united states is very surprising and his comparisions are quite interesting. i did not know of these relationships andl their impact on all of us as citizens. they are very thought provoking and i dont know why i or we were not taught about all of this. the perspective presented is one that all of us should know about. where is the education system that i went through that missed all of this or did the teachers not know or did they refuse to teach it.to know our roots from the past seems to explain so much more that the sound bites of news shows.thanks for your comments
Thanks for the comment, Doug.
You ask an interesting question around whether school teachers are aware of the contemporary relevance of ancestral cultures and are just not teaching it, or if they don’t really understand it themselves. I suspect the answer is some of each. I suspect there is a significant number of teachers more interested in education than in learning, if you know what I mean, and hence not necessarily very knowledgeable in various subject areas. Others might be asked to teach outside of their areas of competence – for example, someone better suited to teach math or science might end up teaching “social studies,” or serving as a lower grade generalist.
I doubt there are many individual teachers who understand the relevance of history yet outright refuse to teach it, but I think several obstacles are stacked against any attempt they might be inclined to make. The cultural tendency toward progressivism seems especially strong in the educational world, and progressivism has nothing but contempt for the past. The exaggerated importance placed on scientific method contributes to a fact-oriented learning environment, to the detriment of higher forms of understanding. And perhaps youth are just not mentally prepared to make the kinds of intelligent connections necessary for true historical sensibility, especially if they’re being fed a steady diet of intellectual junk food by popular culture media and consistently feeble schooling curricula.
I don’t think the future looks too bright for improvement in this area, but it would be good to find a way to challenge the system to do better.