After I uploaded last week’s blog post, I had a funny feeling I had already written about it before. I went to my blog and typed “doing it anyway” in the search box. To my amazement, two posts came up: The one I had just uploaded, and one from January 10, 2020. It had the exact same title and I had written it almost exactly one year before.
I was a little embarrassed at first, and then I got a bit concerned. I’ve written hundreds of blog posts. What if I have nothing new to say and I just start repeating myself from week to week? People will get bored, or confused, or annoyed!
But as I read the two posts, I realized that I had nothing to worry about. The content had the same title, but I was a year older and I was writing from a different place. Yes, I was still struggling with the temptation to quit when things got hard or when I didn’t feel like doing something, but I had moved ahead and done something anyway—two years in a row.
Even though I haven’t accomplished everything I’ve planned to do, I have finished many things in recent years. I have to keep training my mind to celebrate those successes instead of dwelling on the times when I failed and didn’t push forward.
It’s not bad to write about the same things over and over. If I continue to deal with procrastination, doubt, fear, anxiety, and depression from time to time, I can assume some of you need a reminder as you deal with those things as well.
The themes you revisit may be different than mine, but it’s perfectly okay for us to keep going back to the same words, ideas, and struggles. Hopefully, every time we revisit them we’ll be a bit further along in our journey and we’ll have learned some new insights that will help us get unstuck a little more quickly and we’ll be able to see progress.
You’ll probably see me writing about many of the same themes here on this blog, but I’ll try to at least make the titles different from now on.
“For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God.” (Colossians 1:9–10 NIV)
Are there certain themes you keep returning to over and over? How can focusing on God help you to grow so you move forward each time you revisit a theme?