Jake Meador responds to my piece the other day about how I’ve fallen out of love with staying abreast of the news. He finds he’s gone in the same direction since he left the big city to return to Lincoln, Neb., his hometown. And on reflection, he has come to believe that his drive to stay current, always current, earlier in his life had a lot more to do with egotism than he might have thought.

But what I have found in Lincoln is that I love what has been given and I want my life’s work to serve the given creation rather than to make a new one. I used to be about progessing toward some future I would help create. Now I’m much more concerned with conserving the gifts I’ve been given and, in time, have come to love. And so my news reading habits and my personal ambitions are being subtly altered. I still keep up with The News, but for different reasons. I’ll always be a writer and part of stewarding that vocation means staying informed enough to have something to say. But I no longer feel the compulsion to write for a certain number of publications before I’m a certain age or to meet some other obvious, measurable bench mark that will determine when I have become Somebody.

Now I read the News of the Day more out of a desire to be fluent enough in the language and events of the day to defend the things that I love and to ward off the things that threaten them. Put another way, I don’t read The News because I want to participate in the making of it. I read The News because I know it usually is the biggest threat to the things I already love and have given my heart to.

Yes. That.

Read his whole post. It made me think of myself in my mid-20s, coming home from my job in DC and getting frustrated because nobody in my family gave a rat’s ass that I covered Congress, and saw Speaker Gingrich walking the halls on my beat. Or cared much about Speaker Gingrich at all, and not because they weren’t conservative (oh, they were).