What I Learned and Did This Summer

As the official end of summer approaches, I thought I would make a record of what I did, thought about, and learned this summer as I was sorting it all out. Posting was quite slow here and there were numerous reasons for that. I wasn’t joking when I said I was crawling into my introvert summer cave. I’d honestly like to continue to hibernate for a long time.

INFJ and INFP Life

I used this summer to start healing from the past few years. That’s all I’ll say about that at the moment, but there have been many things in recent years that have been crushing for me personally. And when I say many, I mean many.

I spent quite a bit of time watching videos and reading articles about being an INFJ and having a daughter who is an INFP. I inserted a video at the end of this post that is a good summary of some of what Caroline and I have been dealing with. (This post will make more sense with that video as background content.)

In the past, I often wrote about being an INFJ and those posts generally did very well and generated many comments because they resonated with people. At one point, I made the decision to stop writing about personality types for faith-based reasons. However, I realized over the past couple of years as I’ve been parenting that personality type content can be a great shortcut tool for cutting through the garbage and getting to the heart of the matter. (For the record, I completely reject the Enneagram.)

So related to that, I spent a lot of time thinking about these topics:

• Parenting an INFP daughter
• Homeschooling an INFP daughter
• What does it mean to be educated?
• What does life look like after high school for Christian daughters who aren’t interested in college and are homebodies?
• Reading the book Late Bloomers: The Hidden Strengths of Learning and Succeeding at Your Own Pace 

End Times Theology & The Revelation of John

David and I spent quite a lot of time this summer on end times theology. This was due to digging into history, current events, and things happening in our real life circle. I mentioned this a few times over the summer and most recently in Candace Owens Goes Nuclear on Israel, Zionism.

David read Dispensationalism – Rightly Dividing the People of God? because of some circumstances in real life. (He is not and has never been a dispensationalist.) I spent quite a bit of time learning about partial-preterism and preterism. Partial-preterism makes so much sense to me (and David). If you aren’t familiar with it, Dr. R.C. Sproul was a partial-preterist as is Pastor Doug Wilson. All of the verses that seem challenging and the things that Jesus said about “soon” and “this generation” that Christians have to awkwardly try to explain become so obvious in the partial-preterist framework. There’s a lot more I could say about that, but it would be an entire series of posts.

My Website

I spent literally weeks of my summer working on this website and my printables shop. I knew that I had to get things done on the back-end so they were no longer hanging over me. After nineteen years of blogging and product creation, there were just so many loose ends that I needed to deal with.

God answered one of my prayers like He often does – by a link to a link to a link. In this case, I was watching a CensorTube video of an interview. I realized I hadn’t been to that woman’s website in a long time so I went there. I opened a random blog post and there was a link to Martha Stewart. And THAT was where I found the answer to my website menu troubles. Her drop-down menu set-up was exactly what I needed. I have so much content on this website that it’s challenging to present it all. I found my answer there when I wasn’t actively looking. But God provided. It was such a huge answer to prayer. I’m not completely done with all of the submenus, but the main menu is all done.

I’ve shared many times the past few years about how broken everything is online regarding search, etc. I won’t rehash that. But it became clear to me from news over the summer that this problem won’t be resolved any time soon so it only made sense to move all of my content to one website. Building a new website right now is an exercise in futility. So many people are quitting blogging and creating websites because there is no rhyme or reason to any of it right now.

So I moved everything back here. I’ve moved a lot of Sallie’s Rebuilding America back here (News), but not all of it. There simply isn’t time to move it all here. The only thing I haven’t finished is moving For the Love of Pansies back here. I really like the way we created that website and I’m sad to give it up. But no one will ever find it in search and it makes no sense to invest time (I really don’t have) into something that can’t flourish. So hopefully tomorrow I will move that content back here. At that point, all of my content will be in one place.

I don’t have many regrets about blogging, but the one I do have is a big one. I wish I had always done my own thing rather than spending literally a year or two of my life adapting to outside influences and expert opinions. I can’t even fathom how many days, weeks, months, and even years I’ve spent pivoting, adjusting, changing, updating, etc. It actually makes me sick to my stomach when I think about it. I wish I had had enough confidence in my own instincts and abilities to stick with my own vision when I started and not allowed myself to be swayed by others.

As an INFJ I am wired to consider the needs of others and want to meet them. Over the years I’ve started other websites to put content on them in order to remove “stressful” theological topics and news topics from my site. In retrospect, I think that was a mistake. A well-intentioned mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. There is no way to please everyone and I decided this summer I will please myself for however long I continue to do this. Others can feel free to join me or not. But chasing after readers and subscribers and search engine rankings by doing what is acceptable is no longer a part of my life.

So after numerous changes and false starts over the past several months, I settled on what I wanted. David and I made this website design based on what makes me happy to work here and not on what will necessarily attract readers.

So that’s some of what’s been going on with me. I hope you’ve had a good summer. I truly hope to be blogging regularly again.

Here’s the video I mentioned above. Perhaps some of you will relate to this.

Why INFJs (and INFPs) Hide From the World

Caroline (INFP) and I (INFJ) both found this video incredibly accurate. The only part we disagreed with is that neither one of us suffer from social anxiety or fear of going out. It’s often just too people-y (as we call it) and it takes us a long time to decompress from all of it when we get home. By long time I mean it can take days depending on what we’ve done. This was the big issue with my position at church. It meant way too many Sunday meetings which then derailed our homeschool week. We need a different kind of life. We are happiest with a different kind of life. We also didn’t like the word shame as she used it. We would use the word misunderstood instead.