And we are back online! The blog looks a lot more simple (which I am actually loving) and there are template elements missing, but the core of it is all there.

A while ago I started noticing error messages blocking my blog entries. It took a bit of investigating to figure out what the problem was, because I never received notification of changes that were going to happen. A photo storage site I used to store my blog background and fancy little images, making my blog unique from others, now wants over $400 a year to continue storing these images. I didn’t have the faintest clue as to how to remedy this issue without starting a whole new blog.

I write the things,
I don’t do the techy things.

After talking it over, we decided that we already put as much money as we could into the blog and $400+ a year wasn’t an option. The purpose of my blog is to share God’s goodness in the journey–share our faith, our story, and encourage others. The only way to really make this work, would be to have sponsors to try to help pay for the costs. Since I am not making blogging a business, this wouldn’t make sense. I could also start having ads on the blog, which I am not interested in, just because I don’t know what will be advertised and I may not agree with advertisements posted, the decision was made to just remove the blog and leave that part of life for a bit.

For a brief moment this decision felt freeing. No pressure to write. No criticism to deal with. No wondering whether anyone reads these words I peck out onto my keyboard or whether I just peck away and send my heart out into the bottomless abyss of the www. It seemed like the easy thing to do and it sounded rather nice.

Then came the outpouring of support to keep on writing on this platform and the emails of tech support to help keep the blog going. At the very same time a fellow grief blogger ran into the exact same problem and she found a simple solution, my less than techy self could work with. I made the changes and the blog was functioning without the ads covering my blog entries. Still, I wasn’t sure whether I should put it back online. There was an inner battle going on and I didn’t know whether I had it in me to ‘put myself out there’ anymore…it’s a very vulnerable place to be. To open up your heart and what God is whispering into your heart, knowing not everyone agrees with you. Some days it’s a hard place to be. But then, this afternoon when I read the following: