On the other hand, I know exactly how you feel. As an (overly?!) educated person with solid writing skills, I often wonder if I should be doing more than writing poems and stories and thinking about writing books. But those things are important too. And if writing about what you ate for lunch has people’s interest (which it does!), getting people to read about any subject from your perspective is a cool cool thing.

p.s. I think we can be great friends.

On a separate note, I can identify with the situation you mention in this post. I wanted to write about thought provoking stuff but end up with a blogger’s block if one exists so what I ended up doing was to follow my heart and write what came naturally.

Giving thought to Darfur and similar topics might be important, giving away our comforts for such things might be more important yet, but maybe you are focusing on giving something you don’t necessarily have to give, or giving it in a way that you are not being called to give it (these are just things to ponder more than suggestions of what is happening). Pray to God to tell you what you must do for Darfur—be it absolutely nothing or flying there personally—and accept it and do it. I guess there are a few things you could ponder: Is your writing really going to make a difference in itself? Is writing about it what you need to do about it? Is writing seemingly inconsequential things beneficial for yourself? Is it for anyone in the world? If you can’t know, have you asked God to see if you should continue any and only in faith hope that writing about a dream might be of a certain value to any one person in the universe in God’s elaborate plans? Could your inconsequential ramblings eventually give you more power as a writer for when your writing can actually be consequential when it is actually sought after by God to be so, be it about Darfur, the heath care system, or about a brother or sister in need? Is there any leave from God to write about pancakes? Is there any leave from God to write about Darfur? I guess when writing as in everything else (especially when you want it to mean something), that’s the one thing you want to know and that’s the only way meaningful will really be meaningful.