Doing My Own PR: What I Blog About

"So what do you blog about?" someone asked me recently.

I hesitated, not exactly sure how to answer the question.

"He writes sermon-illustrations," a frequent reader of mine offered. I cringed. Someone gave me a book of sermon illustrations when I came on IV staff. It's terrible, awful, pre-packaged, trite, overly-sentimental, sloppy, thin, and abundantly atrociously grotesquely bad.

All this goes to show what a friend of mine in p.r. once told me: if you don't explain or interpret yourself, others will do it for you. This has pressed me over the past couple of days to think more about how I need to answer the question: what do I blog about?

So here in January at the beginning of the Year of Our Lord 2010, I want to articulate what I blog about.

The time-line of our lives, contexts, culture, relationships, and our internal world all run in one direction. The gospel intersects that line in a nearly infinite number of ways at any given time. I want to pay attention to and live out of the near-infinite number of ways that the gospel intersects my world and our broader world in real-time.

If the Christian story is true, if Jesus really was God-become-flesh and if he really did die for all the brokenness and rebellion in the world and if he really did rise again from the dead three days later, then that changes everything.

To paraphrase a great theologian there isn't any part of the world, our culture, our lives, or our internal world that Jesus does not shout, "MINE!" It's all Jesus' by virtue of his creating it and a second time by virtue of his redeeming it, his "again-making" to quote Julian of Norwich's delightful phrase. And for the most part, we sleep-walk through that reality.

Blogging about the infinite intersection of the gospel in our real-time lives keeps me awake, alert, on tip-toe looking for those realities: in parenting, ministry, Scripture, marriage, coaching kids soccer teams, or following Muslims through airports. The gospel changes everything, in real-time. That's what I blog about.

Or at least, that's what I want to be blogging out. Thanks for those of you who track with me--and even more thanks to those of you who read regularly while occasionally wondering what the heck I'm talking about.

Writing these posts quickens me to the reality of the gospel intersecting my experiences. I hope it might do the same for you.

And if not, maybe I need to hire my own personal professional p.r. guy...or maybe I need to look into writing sermon illustration books.