Hello there,
My name is Jon Palmer. I imagine that most of the people who will read this blog will know enough about me that an introduction won't be necessary. I'm going to make one anyway:
I'm a twenty-something living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I currently work at a restaurant in a suburb of Saint Paul. I have an Associate of Arts degree from Century College, a community college not far from where I live. I pursued a bachelor's degree in English for a time, attending Concordia University, St. Paul. At one point I stopped that pursuit. The story is more involved than one I'd want to include in an introductory post.
Most of the time I don't spend at work is spent focusing energy toward involvement in ministry at my church. I serve as a volunteer fulfilling various roles in my church's high school youth ministry, my church's college-age ministry, and often on Sunday mornings as well. Much of the time that isn't spent at actual ministry events is spent developing relationships with the people I come across in the course of involvement with those ministries.
I am the third of five children. Growing up a middle child in a big family helped me to develop a strong desire for attention and significance. I'm extremely contemplative, often to the point of torturing myself with introspection. Combine these traits with a general sense that I'm often misunderstood and an obsessive need to explain myself, and it's a wonder I haven't been blogging for years now.
This blog is called The 14:10. It's a reference to Proverbs. "Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can share its joy."
I came across this verse as I spent five weeks in Colombia this past summer. It has been a great comfort to me. I don't often feel understood when I talk about things of a serious nature or things of particular importance to me. If someone does enough thinking about his life and about a million other things, a feeling that he's seldom understood can really wear on him. Perhaps being understood is something I don't need to obsess over as much as I have in the past.
And so this blog will likely serve me better than it will its readers. I'll have a place in which I can express myself and expand on my thoughts, and on good days I won't be so obsessed with being understood that I stumble all over my words.
That being said, I hope that my thoughts and stories can be useful in some way. They have no basis in anything but my mind. If what I write in this blog makes you think, entertains you, or challenges you at some point, I'll be happy with it. If it ever contains material that is disagreeable or offensive to you, feel free to leave comments. If none of those things happen, it'll probably still be fun enough for me to keep doing it...and by that I mean that I'm too obsessed with my own trains of thought not to think that the world needs them in some way.
Enjoy. Or don't. I'm sure I will.
