Some personal news...

...in which I bury the lede (or fail to emphasize the most important part of the story)

A couple of weeks ago, I noted that what I wrote then might be my last Holland Sentinel column. The column wasn’t accepted for publication – a first for me – so in a way it turned out to be my letter of resignation, as well as an elegy of sorts for the local newspaper, which continues to die across the country.

What’s been interesting and helpful, even though it’s been happening out of public view, is that the Sentinel’s opinion-page columnists have been participating in a group email chat, lately with the subject line “writing for the Sentinel is not much fun anymore.”

My opinion-page colleagues, most of whom I’ve never met, are not of one mind about what to do in the wake of the firing our beloved editor. One, like me a retired pastor, has decided that he’s going to quit. After a couple of decades, he’s had enough. Another, a psychotherapist in private practice, is angry and offers blunt assessments of the mental state of the Sentinel’s current owners and managers. (The Sentinel is owned by Gannett, the parent company of USA Today.) And still others are determined to write about national topics, even though the new boss has suggested that we keep the focus local.

So, these days what was a fine local newspaper is mostly covering restaurant openings, business closings, and dates when the downtown farmers market can be expected to be open. A snoozefest, if you ask me (which to be honest no one has).

What am I going to do? My career as a newspaper columnist is most likely over (did you notice that I left the door just slightly ajar?), but that is hardly the worst news I’ve had lately. A kidney stone the size of Gibraltar was found in my right kidney a couple of weeks ago, and I spent four days in Holland Hospital receiving antibiotics through an IV drip. (Sepsis was of greater concern to my urologist than the stone itself.) The stone, which I’ve been told is in the 6 -7 mm range, will be obliterated this week with laser lithotripsy, a word I reluctantly learned to spell only yesterday. I should be able to resume normal activities soon after.

As for those “normal activities,” I plan to focus much more attention on this Substack newsletter, which very soon may have more subscribers than the Sentinel. It started as a WordPress blog in 2012, and then more than two years ago I migrated my subscriber list to Substack. And since then, the list has more than doubled. It is now approaching 700, for which I’m truly grateful! I’m not exactly Heather Cox Richardson (who has more than 1.2 million subscribers), but I’m gaining on her.

And then, as for those “normal activities,” I’m training to walk the Portuguese Camino in October. It’s half the length of the Camino Frances, which I walked in 2019, but it’s still a challenge at 250 miles. I’m going to give it 12 days, and I might pay a couple of euros each day to have my backpack transported to the next stop because, well, I’m not exactly as young as I used to be.

But the best news of all – newspaper types like to call this “burying the lede” – is that my latest book, my eighth, is now under contract, and it is scheduled for publication very early in 2025. I’m really fired up about that, and I plan to spend lots of time in 2025 traveling to promote the book. (Please invite me to preach at your church.) The book doesn’t yet have a title, but I’m looking forward to the big reveal as soon as that’s possible. Stay tuned. And thanks for being a reader!