I’m not a traveling musician. I’m not a parachurch ministry leader. I’m not a nationally recognized speaker. I’m not a pastor. I’m not a youth pastor. I’m not a theology teacher. I’m not a radio personality, Christian or otherwise.
I’m not a mom. I’m not a professional photographer. I’m not a football player or a NASCAR driver.
My boss doesn’t see blogging as a ministry opportunity. Twitter, as best I can tell, doesn’t do anything to make my machines work better.
I’m just a Christian who is trying to be more like Christ every day and usually failing more often than not.
This blog is about normal Christians. Not the Christians that make a living from Christianity. (They’re good guys too, but they have a different viewpoint.) This blog is about the thoughts of a guy whose kids play sports. A guy whose cars tear up. A guy with a driveway a quarter mile long and a lot of snow. A guy with a mortgage payment that hurts. A guy who actually puts money in the offering plate that didn’t come from the same coffers. (No offense to church employees, but I think you can see the humor there.) A guy who doesn’t have 200 books on Christianity from his seminary training. (No offense to those guys either. It’s just different trying to learn all this stuff in the course of living a normal life.)
This blog is my attempt to mend the disconnect between Christianity and going to work on Monday morning. To give a voice to the guy who fights traffic to get home for supper on Wednesday night and still make it to church so that the pastor won’t be discouraged or even angry. To discuss the spiritual lessons in a Nascar race or a Super Bowl. To encourage the guy who doesn’t get an adrenaline rush from preaching at four services every Sunday. To build up the guys and gals who are actually IN the crowd at church and don’t get to stand on stage and be vilified by the 3000 people who showed up to hear them speak.
A huge proportion of blogs are written by folks like that. Folks who are great people but blog from a “Christian world” perspective. They get hammered with a lot of things, but not the same things that blue collar and white collar workers endure.
The challenges are different.
This blog is my attempt to improve my own Christian life and hopefully give some energy to other “regular” people.
*To all the people that I’ve mentioned that might be offended by these statements, please don’t be. I still think you’re awesome and I might even be envious, depending on who you are. Your problems are actually probably much bigger than mine, but that doesn’t make mine disappear. But I bet I’ve got a perspective that you don’t. Let’s all help each other.
Tony York says:
I really appreciated this. I am there with you!
25th August 2010 at 2:15 pm
Michael says:
Love this thought… “This blog is my attempt to mend the disconnect between Christianity and going to work on Monday morning. ” That statement resonates with me. It reminds me of a sermon I heard not long ago.
Basically it was about the way some people think about their life. The pastor used the illustration of how some people view their life like a dresser. In a dresser are alot of drawers. Some will have a relationship drawer, a work drawer, a church drawer, etc. The problem is they live their life that way – opening one drawer at a time. They live life by opening the church drawer on Sunday and closing it Sunday night. Man how this limits their relationship with God. What they need to understand is that God is dresser, not the drawer.
23rd December 2010 at 5:30 pm
Bernard Shuford says:
It’s been a while since I blogged anything relative to this supposed purpose, huh.
I like the dresser analogy. There’s a lot rumbling in my head that I’m terrified to put down “on paper”, to be quite honest, because someone might hold me to it in the future, and it’s just thoughts right now.
24th December 2010 at 12:32 am