After 500 issues & 10-1/2 years, Weekly Baptist Roundup is heading for ‘the last roundup’ 
by Bill Jones

To my Weekly Baptist Roundup family,

The Weekly Baptist Roundup issue of Saturday, December 18, 2021, will be issue no. 500. That number is hard for me to fathom, but it represents 10-1/2 years – except for a 10-month “hiatus” after Texas Baptists Committed ended operations in August 2017. In May 2018, I told Joanna that I had come to feel that God had not wanted me to end “the Roundup” at that time, so I resumed publication on my own dime, supported by donations (Joanna, as an expression of her love and support, made the first donation).

However, now I believe the time has come for me to end the Roundup once and for all. I’ve enjoyed it, and I will miss it. On the rare weeks that I take a break (once or twice a year at the most), I find myself reading articles and feeling frustrated that I can’t link to them in the Roundup that week. So I know I’ll suffer some “withdrawal pangs,” and I know that many of you who have come to depend on the Roundup for its wide selection of sources of Baptist news, opinion, analysis, & commentary will miss it, too.

There are several reasons for this decision. The main reason is that the Roundup requires about 20-25 hours every week, and it doesn’t leave me much time for other things I need to be doing.

• One, I believe God is leading me to focus more on my own writing – on issues of ethics, theology, church & state, and so forth. I need time to do more in-depth reading (I have hundreds – that’s no exaggeration – of books in my study that have gone unread for lack of time), and to do the preparation work required to “flesh out” the many concerns that I want to address in my writing.

• Two, still involving writing, I have a secular political novel that has been sitting on my computer for over 20 years. Many of you know that I spent 20 years as a technical writer & editor in the corporate world. In 1999, when I was laid off (a fate that befalls tech writers every so often), I wrote 45,000 words of my novel and even took it to a writer’s conference and discussed it with an agent, who said it showed a lot of promise. Then I got a job, and those 45,000 words have gone practically untouched since then. I promised Joanna she would one day see my completed novel; I failed to keep that promise. So now I need to finish it before I die; I can feel her at my back, nudging me to “get with it.”

• Three, last year I promised Joanna I would end the Roundup in May of this year; however, in the months before she passed away, she wavered, seeing the continuing response I was getting in appreciative emails, donations, etc., and she said maybe I could “cut back” on the number of links so it wouldn’t take so many hours. Well, I’ve given that some thought, and it wouldn’t work. For one thing, I can’t do it halfway; for another, I would still be focused on the Roundup from week to week, and it would keep me from other things.
  Joanna was concerned about my having time to focus on my own writing; she was also anxious that I give attention to the papers and other “stuff” accumulated over the years and start getting rid of it as we get older. Can any of you relate to this problem? We’ve been paying $100 monthly on a storage unit for years, and she wanted to be able to bring all that stuff back as soon as possible. Anyway, this is one promise I can keep to Joanna. Besides that, with Joanna’s passing in February and my turning 70 just a month later, I’ve been feeling the urgency, more than ever, to start going through “stuff” and getting rid of it so our kids won’t have to worry about it when I’m gone or otherwise incapacitated.

• Four, ever since I lost the love of my life, my wife, my partner, my companion, Joanna, in February, I have come to realize a greater need to spend time getting to know God better, to know Jesus better, to have a deeper understanding of the mystery of heaven and the life that follows this one, the one that Joanna is already living. It is a mystery . . . the Bible doesn’t spell it all out or give us a clear picture of the life to come. However, I know this:
  Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. (John 14:1-3, NIV)
  My trust is in Jesus, and I take Him at his word.
  As I’ve read the articles for the Roundup each week, I’ve found myself especially fascinated by those that address death and the life to come. A few weeks ago, in reading Brett Younger’s column in the Coracle blog, Death and Life, I was mesmerized by his quote of a passage from Eugene O’Neill’s play, Lazarus Laughed, and went to eBay.com, found a copy and bought it before I finished Brett’s column! O’Neill’s Lazarus – after Jesus has raised him from the dead and then departed the scene – says, “There is no death, really. There is only life. There is only God. There is only incredible joy. Death is not the way it appears from this side. Death is not an abyss into which we go into chaos. It is, rather, a portal through which we move into everlasting life.” Beautiful!
  Anyway, I say all of this to say that I look forward to having more time not only to read and to write but to seek (knowledge & understanding), learn, pray and contemplate.

• Lastly, but most importantly, our son, Travis – who is disabled as a result of a stroke suffered in April 2013 – and his 9-year-old daughter live with me; with Joanna gone, they need my time and attention even more than when she was here, as do our daughter, Alison, and her husband and three children as well. Family has always been my top priority, as it was Joanna’s. She would be pleased to see how this family that she and I formed together has pulled together to help each other and love each other through this terrible time of loss. Tough times have always brought our family closer together, and I’m thankful for that.

Though the Roundup is going away, I am not. I plan to be blogging regularly, putting my two cents in on matters that interest and concern me, hoping to continue to have an impact. (and I’ll probably channel my “withdrawal pangs” into occasionally posting some of those great Baptist articles – BNG, GFM, Baptist Standard, Word&Way, a few of my favorite Baptist bloggers, etc. – to my Facebook page)

I’ll continue editing the Curated page of Baptist News Global, an opportunity presented to me by Mark Wingfield beginning a little over a year ago.

In addition, I continue to serve on the Pastors for Texas Children Board, and in January I will begin a 3-year term on the Christian Advocacy Committee at my home church of the past 17 years, Wilshire Baptist in Dallas. These serve as outlets for my passion for advocating for public education and on other issues where I can care for those whom Jesus called “the least of these.”

In these last 2 issues, Dec. 11 & 18, I’ll be thanking people (there are a lot of them to thank) and probably doing a little more commenting on issues of the day, probably firing a few more “shots” (comforting the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable) before I transition away from the Roundup.

When I was much younger, I remember enjoying the comedian Red Buttons on the old Dean Martin Roasts. Red Buttons’s “shtick” was to talk about some figure from the past, then finish with the punch line, “He never got a dinner!” Well, I got a dinner. I retired as TBC executive director when we ceased operations in August 2017. A year later, Wilshire Baptist Church and the Texas Baptists Committed Board gave me a wonderful retirement dinner. Some of you were at that dinner; some of you even spoke at that dinner. It was an evening my family and I will never forget.

So I’ve had my retirement, and I’ve been given a wonderful dinner. Who could ask for anything more? Instead of calling this a second retirement, let’s just call it a transition to new challenges and to a new calling.

With joyful appreciation and anticipation,
Bill Jones