What I Learned On My Blogging Break

About a month ago, I felt a sense of confusion and a lack of clarity in my heart. When Trisha and I started RefineUs.org we started it to be a resource for people we prayed could and would find hope through our story. What was awesome is that the more we wrote about lessons from the implosion of our marriage, the more opportunities God gave us to share our story. We spoke at several churches, we began to counsel couples who were hurting…in person, over video chat, on the phone, via email. The response was so positive and overwhelming, we then started a non-profit organization called RefineUs Ministries.

When we moved to Nashville, and transitioned back into vocational ministry at Cross Point, somehow I began to lose my way with our blog and our marriage ministry. I began to view blogging as an obligation, and not an overflow of what God was doing in my heart or in our marriage. I began to be addicted to stats and tweets and retweeets. I began to measure the success of our blog, not by the people we were helping with our story, but the amount of traffic I could drive to our site and the amount of comments that were left.

This wasn’t an obvious or quick shift, it was subtle and slow. I have been praying a prayer for the past four years, and what is awesome and hard is that God continues to answer it. The prayer is “Search my heart, O God. Show me if there is any arrogance, pride, misguided motives or lies in me.” Over and over again, God answers that prayer, and then it is up to me to respond. When I began to pray that prayer in October, I sensed God asking me to take a sabatical from our blog and from Twitter…and just seek Him. Here are some things that I’ve learned over the past month.

• The vision God has given us for this blog and for RefineUs Ministries is from Him and it is part of what we are called to do with our life (more on this in the days and weeks ahead)
• It is wild how ideas, dreams and visions that start out being all about God can drift toward being sometimes about God and a lot of the time about us
• The value of our blog is found the marriages that are able to find hope and healing and not by our stats
• Who I am in real life is so much more important to me than who people perceive me to be on Twitter or Facebook

Motives matter. I know I won’t always have pure motives in everything I do, or everything I write or everything I say. But I want to surrender my motives to God and allow His character to be formed in me. The past 30 days have allowed God to do that…and my prayer is that this community and RefineUs Minstries will be more of what God has in mind, as I become more of who God longs for me to be and as Trisha and I embrace and pursue more of what RefineUs Ministries can and should be. It feels good to be back, and have clarity and vision.