About ten years ago I put together a simple website as a repository for audio recordings of classes I had taught. It was a convenience for me and for several friends who kept asking if they could listen to the classes again. I put them online where they could easily find them. The website was primitive even by the standards of that day, but it served its limited purpose. Time went by and I pretty much forgot about it until a few months ago when one of my friends, who still looked at the site occasionally, told me that it was no longer available. “Oh, really?” I said. “I’ll look into it.”

It turns out that someone (namely, me) had neglected to pay the annual hosting fee. Furthermore, I had ignored the warnings from the host company and, true to their word, after 30 days they cancelled the site and trashed it, including all the associated files. My bad. Even so, I really didn’t want to lose those old recordings so I set about to see if I could find them again. They had become scattered across three generations of laptops, various Dropbox files, iCloud storage, etc. etc. Eventually, I was able to find nearly all of them and concluded that my haphazard filing system was inadequate. If they were worth saving, I should spend some time organizing them properly. That’s how this website got started.

Several weeks later, with the help of numerous Youtube tutorials, I have acquired a modest degree of skill in using WordPress, Elementor, and other site-building programs, and this new site is the product (for better or worse). The old recordings are preserved here, along with more recent ones (audio and video). I decided to make these available to “Members Only”. This is entirely free, but I’m curious to know who might be listening or viewing because, who knows?, maybe it will lead to some interesting and worthwhile conversations.

In the process of archiving these older things, something else happened. I began to envision a way to continue doing things I enjoy, and where I can make a positive contribution, but without the institutional platform of a church or non-profit organization or school that always undergirded my work before. Retirement, in my view, does not mean that we no longer have meaningful work to do, but the form and focus of that work necessarily changes. I’ll have more thoughts to share on that theme later, but that’s enough for now.

Bob Paul