This is a guest post by Jeremy Jenson.
These are the 5 questions I like to ask myself before writing a blog post.
1. Is it prayerful?
This does not always mean sitting down and kneeling over every word. If a post is coming from direct personal experience it will often be covered in prayer even before you begin writing. It is more important that our lives are prayerful and our posts come from that prayerful life. However prayer should be a part of every post.
2. Is it for sharing?
There are experiences that we have and lessons we learn that are private and personal. Sometimes they need to be shared for the sake of lifting up others or teaching us honesty and humility. Other times the experiences are so personal that they should be kept treasured between us and God.
Although it is important to give a full view of our Christian experience to others it is not necessary to share or tweet everything. We must be ok to say ‘no, this is just between me and God.’ So I need to ask myself honestly,’ is this for sharing?’ If a blog post profanes a sacred moment between me and God I need to rethink posting it.
3. Is there scripture?
My words often come up short but scripture never returns void. The only caution here is not to ‘throw out’ scripture at every chance but rather realize our limitations in explaining what scripture does on its own. It is best when it flows naturally from the post and fits with the other questions we ask.
4. Is it forced?
Sometimes I am a little stubborn about random things. For example when I bought a pillow that was amazingly uncomfortable but I refused to return it. In my defense after a week of not sleeping well I finally got used to it.
To be honest I don’t have 5 points. (I suppose you would have figured that out pretty soon). I really wanted to have 5 points, even if I had to make up the last one. But I don’t want my posts to be forced. I need to be OK with throwing it out, saving it for later, or changing it from what I originally envisioned. It’s a silly example of a bigger issue. Every post will not flow off my fingertips onto the keyboard, but I want to make sure that I am being genuine in every word.
Those are my 4 top questions, what are yours?
Jeremy, thanks for writing today's post! Great advice. One additional question I think is important to ask…
Will this be helpful to my readers?
I ask that because I know a lot of bloggers to use their blogs voice or vent whatever is on their mind. Sometimes it's random thoughts, sometimes is its a story about something that happened to them with no really point, sometimes they bounce around from topic to topic with no focus. Sometimes Christians try to spiritualize this by saying they blog "as the Spirit leads them, but the reality is their posts are really about them rather than their readers. If you want to build an audience and impact people through your blog, you have to put your readers first and be thinking about how you can help them. My $0,02
Great points. I especially like the one about being "forced." I've tried to write some forced posts before, and they don't flow at all. I know you can try to make up things to constitute the "top 5 _____" but I like your point here – that you didn't really have a good fifth, so you didn't write it:-)
And yes, pray before you write!
Thanks for the comments!
I really agree with the "Will this be helpful…" point. Wish I would have though of it! But then I wouldn't have dealt with the struggle of not putting in a fifth point 🙂
Hello, I'm from EA and I guess all of the peoples you interplay there (with a stable connection) own something very unique! I appreciate this article that open to many the possibility to share content by you. I wonder if you're open to content that is related to religion other from the Christian one that obey the same criteria of this article? Thank you.
GOOD
Why only christian blog.. Is reader really want to know who are writing the blog and who are the owner?