10 Things I promise not to write on my blog.

Mostly this is my blog offering my thoughts on faith, spirituality and ministry.  I talk about myself and my struggles to live into where I feel like God is calling me. As of late, my chief vehicle for doing this, has been book reviews.  My posts are fairly varied, because my reading takes me in a lot of different directions. I promise to try and augment these posts with actually real life content. However these are thingI promise I will never blog about here:

1.  I promise to never, ever blog about how to grow your social media profile. I will admit to reading a few blogs that specialize in these sorts of articles. However I absolutely can’t stand when theological bloggers, authors, and ministry blogs take time to tell you the reasons why they have become so incredibly popular online.  This seems to be the height of narcissism. Okay blogging in general may be narcissistic–you have to believe in your own specialness to think that your paltry life and opinion is worth reading. But posts about why you are such an effective blogger turn me off and make me never want to read your blog again (even if I follow your advice).
2. I promise to never blog as though I am the voice of my generation.  I won’t act like I have a bead on the whole culture, and try to speak for everybody. There are thoughtful perspectives which I enjoy. There are others I relate to, but any blogger that presumptuously speaks for everyone in their age group annoys the snot out of me, even if I like what they have to say. I have a perspective and I may even think I’m right about somethings, but there is a plurality of opinions  and places I need to be challenged in my own thinking.  I am one voice among many and often I am the dissenting voice.
3. I promise to never, ever blog about the latest asinine thing Mark Driscoll or John Piper says.  Okay I admit that I have done this in the past.  It is real easy to get sucked in.  Both of these guys have said somethings they shouldn’t of.  And wach has apologized for some of their most outlandish mistakes.  I respect their humility for that, even if there are issues where I find myself in constant disagreement with them.  I just think that this is a online discussion that has played itself out and I don’t feel like posting another, “he actually said that post” about these two. However, I am a little irked at Rick Warren for the moment.
4. I will not mention Milley Cyrus on my blog.  I mean, other than now.  I agree with many of the critiques of her performance at the VMA.  But to continue to give these sort of shenanigans our attention contributes to their power.  Can we move on, please, to something beautiful and redemptive and not a waste of our collective time?
5. I will not blog about the effective witness of professional athletes. Yes, you can find my  review of Bryan Clay’s biography. I even follow a couple of  high profile Christian athletes on Twitter. I just don’t think a dropped knee in the end zone automatically qualifies you as an effective Christian witness and I am suspicious of the way our talk of God gets intertwined with tales of personal success on the field.  God probably does care if your team wins, He just also cares that the other team lost.  Christlike character is not always exemplified by those in the limelight. I am more interested in the quiet faithfulness of those on the sidelines.
6. I will not write the top ten reasons to boycott Christian films. I have reasons. They are good ones. You probably shouldn’t watch Christian films, but I got enough grief for telling y’all to boycott CCM, so I’m playing this one close to the vest.
7. I will not sling mud. I remember hearing Ravi Zacharias say in a talk, ” When you throw mud not only do you get your hands dirty,  you also lose a lot of ground.”  When you are unkind towards your opponents, even when you are right, you will not win them over. I want to blog in a manner that shows respect to alternative views.  I think it is sad that many religious debates online devolve into one person calling another Satan or questioning their  eternal salvation. We need more humility and grace online. We need it offline as well, but online is good practice.  I think we ought to have convictions and speak our minds, but we should do so in a manner that is mindful that we are speaking with fellow image-bear-ers.
8. I will not review anything that I can’t share my honest opinion about. When I first started looking at online book reviews, I found a couple different blog review programs which stated in their contract, that reviews ought to be positive and if you had any serious problems with the book you should air your grievances privately with the publisher directly and not online.  I wrote one of these publishers promising to be generous, fair, sympathetic and kind, but I told them I couldn’t promise glowing positive reviews because I felt for my reviews to be value, they had to be honest. They never returned my email, I don’t review anything for that publisher.
9. I will not write anything about crafting or knitting here. Maybe on my other blog.
10. I will not give you exhaustive details about my gastrointestinal track. Somethings are best left to the imagination.

So thanks for reading about ‘what not to expect from this blog.’ If you are a blogger, be sure to comment below about the type of posts you refuse to write on.