I am moving. Again.

Sometime over the course of the next three months, I am moving from New York to Oregon.

That’s 3000 miles.

You almost cannot move further and still stay within the continental United States.

This means CHAOS in my life for the next several months.

And when chaos reigns, the first thing to go is blogging… well, maybe sleep, and then after that blogging.

So over the summer, I may be posting much less frequently.

Nevertheless, I hope you stick around since I have big plans for this blog after life settles down a bit. If you really miss the frequent posts, you can always go back and read through the archives. That will keep you busy…

How You Can Benefit

If you want to write a Guest Post for my blog, I am willing to consider it for publication.

Your post would be:

• Viewed by over 1000 daily visitors
• Sent out to over 500 people on my weekly mailing list
• Tweeted to over 6000 followers
• Posted on my Facebook page with over 800 “close friends“

All of this could lead to more exposure and readers for your blog!

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I was recently criticized by a pastor for promoting my blog on Twitter and Facebook. He said these sorts of actions made me guilty of self-promotion.

Ironically, I know this pastor, and he himself has a website and two books, both of which he promotes through email and direct mail marketing. When I challenged him on this, he said he does this because he has a message which he thinks other people will benefit from hearing. He went on to say that my message bordered on heretical and my methods of promoting my message proved it.

Ah… So when you speak the truth, it is okay to send junk mail and spam to people who didn’t ask for it, but when you don’t speak the truth, any method you use is wrong, even if it is permission marketing, where you only send information to people who ask for it and benefit from it.

I am speaking tongue-in-cheek, of course. The bottom line was that this pastor didn’t like what I was saying, and therefore, didn’t like that people were reading what I was teaching, and viewed any form of trying to get my message out as self-promotion.

However, I think there is a difference between self-promotion, and truth-promotion. I try to promote truth, and keep myself out of of it as much as possible.

I feel that if you have truth to teach to others, you have every responsibility to get it out to as many people as possible who want to hear it and who will benefit from it.

This is why I was so thrilled to be chosen this week to join Michael Hyatt’s Platform Launch Team. I will share more with you in the near future.

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Are you a follower of Jesus?

Do you like to leave comments on other people’s blogs?

Let me provide a few suggestions on how to leave good comments on other people’s blogs:

1. Be Loving. If you can’t say it with love, don’t say it at all. If you want to condemn someone to hell, don’t leave a comment. If you have the urge to yell at someone, don’t leave a comment. If you leave a comment which you think is loving, and people suggest your comment wasn’t loving, you may want to rethink how you interact with people online.
2. Be willing to learn. You don’t know it all. Seriously. Recognize that no matter how smart you are, there are other smart people in the world too who view things differently. If there are others who view things differently, maybe you can learn from what they have to say. At the bare minimum, seek to understand their position before you disagree.
3. Use proper grammar and paragraph breaks. It looks terribly uneducated when your comment is full of grammar and spelling mistakes, and consists of 500 words of run-on sentences without any paragraph breaks. We all make a few spelling and grammar mistakes. I make one or two in every single blog post. But if you want people to read what you write, you need to make the attempt to write in a way that helps people read.
4. DON’T USE ALL CAPS AND LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!!!!!!  In the online world, that comes across as screaming and yelling. Is that really how you want to be perceived?
5. Please, no name-calling. If there is one thing we all should have learned way back in Kindergarten, it is that name-calling never helps any situation. So no matter how much you disagree with someone, you don’t need to resort to calling them a heretic, a false teacher, a reprobate, or other such names. It just doesn’t help.

The reason I am writing about this is because I have recently decided to start banning people who comment on my blog who are unloving and hateful. I might issue a warning or two, but after that…

An Example of a Bad Comment

I don’t mind if people disagree with me. I welcome it. But if you are going to disagree, do so with the five suggestions above.

Below is one example of a person who has been leaving bad comments and who got banned.

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As Easter draws near and Christians around the world focus their thoughts on the resurrection of Jesus, it is sometimes helpful to consider how the world, our lives, and Christianity would be different if Jesus had not risen from the dead.

Make no mistake, we are not challenging the historical fact of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. We firmly believe in the historical reality of the death, burial, and bodily resurrection of Jesus.

But we also know that soon after the resurrection of Jesus, Christians were accused of inventing this story. Some critics claimed that Jesus never died. Others said that the apostles stole the body of Jesus from the grave. Today, there are countless millions of people who still believe that the resurrection is a hoax.

For the April Synchroblog, we want to explore this question in more detail. We want to ask, “What if the resurrection is a lie?”

To participate, follow these steps:

1. Publish your post on or before April 10, 2012.
2. Add your post link in a comment over on the post for the April Synchroblog.
3. The link list will be compiled on April 11, at which time you are asked to add the link list to your own post.

Hope to see you there!

(By the way, this is a GREAT way to get back links to your blog, which Google and other search engines LOVE to see.)
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