It Really Does Matter

My name is David Ancell, and I am an electroholic.  I really like new media.  When I first saw that people had blogs, I had to have one of my own.  I knew a lot of what I wanted to write about, but the problem is that I’m not very good at coming up with a name for things.

I first named my blog Danger!  Falling Brainwaves.  The idea was that I was posting whatever “fell out of” my brain.  It was a pretty silly name, and when I moved my site after getting married, I didn’t want to keep it.  So, I settled on a temporary name of “The Ancell Review.”  It’s not so silly, but it doesn’t convey anything of what I am talking about.  I want to blog about Catholic things from a perspective faithful to the Church.  I am neither famous enough nor important enough that something like this should be named after me.

One day, it came like divine inspiration.  Ever since I have been Catholic, I have been confronted with the “it doesn’t matter” line on a variety of things.  I remember a conversation in the parish hall with a couple of guys who insisted that it doesn’t matter what one believes.  Sometimes, I fell for that line.  When I went to Mass, I dressed very sloppily because I had been convinced that “It doesn’t matter what you wear, but what’s in your heart.”  Never mind that I never stopped to consider what could be in the heart of one who is so careless of their appearance before the greatest thing that we will find this side of Heaven.

The older I get, the more I realize that many of these things do matter. God wants us to love him.  To love him, we have to know him.  To know him, we have to seek to know the truth about him.  This means accepting sound doctrine, giving proper worship, and living in the way he wants us to live.  If we reject what he has revealed about himself, we are telling him that we don’t accept him as he is but rather want him to be someone else.  At best, this is a mistake; at worst, it is idolatry.

Looking at my blog, many of my older posts came from this theme.  I tried to highlight things that our secular society, or even people in the Church, think are unimportant.  My posts often explained that they were and important and why.  So, it only made sense that this blog will be known as “It Really Does Matter.”