I have just received an email about this website, The Narrow Way, saying that as I have not renewed my domain name the site will be closed in 7 days! I went to the link they gave me – somewhere in Australia - in order to re-register it but they then asked for my account details. That is a problem because my friend Maggie, who died last month, set up the site for me and she was the only one who knew the passwords etc for the domain name. Unfortunately she has taken them to the grave with her.
I could try to phone them and jump through various hoops to try and recover it, but I’m not going to. The reason is not that I’m fed up of blogging, although I do go through phases. No, it is more to do with the name. Maggie set it up for me shortly after I left the Church as I had the bright view to using it to advertise my boat as a venue for retreats and quiet days. The name was a play on both narrow boats and the Biblical verse stating that it is the narrow way that leads to salvation.
It seemed a good idea at the time but various things happened which stopped the business from taking off. Looking back, I am very pleased it didn’t work out. I could not have led retreats while my own spiritual life was going through such upheavals. I would have been using it to keep half a foot in my old life, but one of the quotes I keep on my wall is from Andre Gide and says “One does not discover new lands unless one consents to lose sight of the shore” I had to leave my old life entirely in order to discover new shores. Lastly, the boat would never had felt like a proper home while strangers had access to it.
The name, for me, still has strong Christian connections and since I no longer have those links, it seems now is a good time to let the last of my old life go. In fact if you search the web under the Narrow Way you have to plough through an awful lot of (mostly American) evangelical sites before you reach anything to do with boats!
I don’t want to entirely give up blogging though, so I am going to see if it is possible to start a new blog with my boat name in the title. Ideally I would like it to be called Don’t Panic with a subtitle ‘To live is to risk’ or ‘to risk is to live’ – not sure which yet.
If you are interested in continuing to follow my meanderings and know my email address then drop me a line and I’ll let you know when I set up the new blog. If you don’t know my email, I can’t really post it here without being avalanched with offers to extend the size of my parts etc. so all I can suggest is that you do a search in a few weeks for ‘don’t panic’ and see what happens! If I manage to set it up before this one closes, then I’ll post the new website address.
Thank you to my readers for your interest and occasional comments – it’s been fun recording this journey into my new life. Perhaps the next blog will be more about learning to live in contentment with this life I have made rather than a journey towards something else? Bye!
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