Good review, Spence.

My excuse is that I really don't know what the vision is God has prepared for me. You can lump it into failure if you wish but the last few times I thought God was telling me to do something it ended very badly and was obviously my wants instead of His wants. So now I've been beaten down so much that I just don't trust what I'm feeling is from Him. Really don't want to waste months or years of my life on something that I don't know is from Him. I wasted enough of my life on what I wanted.

I'd head to the gulf coast of Mississippi and stay in an old house along the gulf. Spend some time writing and just watching the waves.

"Ok guys...if we do this right we'll end up on motivational posters all over the world!"

This is going to sound very cynical...and it probably is...but you'll be lucky to get better advertising for Jesus than what we see now. If you do anything that's even remotely edgy in terms of Jesus you'll end up with condemnation after condemnation from the vocal minority of people who are trying to be "SUPER CHRISTIANS!™" The ones that are so pious they can't even see their sin because of the blinding sin of others.

Eventually people will tire of having to put up with the constant harassment of those people and having to defend yourself from the attacks within so the ads get watered down back to a nice, safe, boring level. Add in that most of the younger people who would support edgier advertising don't have a lot of free income to donate to things like this and you find that it caters to the "SUPER CHRISTIANS!™"

I was in Christian broadcasting for a number of years so I saw this happening first hand. So many good ideas to reach people were shot down because those in control didn't want to deal with the backlash. If they tried something and it generated a complaint from a pastor, it was gone. No questions asked.
My recent post Payback's a...well, you know what it is

You're very right about human trafficking causing conflict. When I made my first post on the subject, I lost over 20 Twitter followers. (When you only had about 150 at the time, that's a significant number.)

I've had people tell me to stop writing blogs about human trafficking that contain what they deem "explicit content." They get really offended when I say what they call "explicit content" was my sanitized version of what really happened to some young women. If they were offended by the fictionalized version of what happened...which left out a lot of the gory details...what does that say about what's happening to these women?

Sorry to hijack the post here...you just hit my hot button subject. How Christians can sit back and make excuses to avoid helping these women is beyond me now...it just makes me sick.

This is something I've worked on over the last few years and ironically Facebook has helped a lot with it. I've been able to contact people who I've wronged in the past and apologize to them when I had no idea how to contact them any other way.

"So you can imagine my excitement when the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl."

As a fan of the Philadelphia Losers...er...Eagles, I cannot say I do.

I loved your post although I will add sometimes temporary happiness is a welcome change from the day to day if you're facing a rough patch.

Another great post, Lindsey! I can't wait to see the effect your conference has on your blogging!
My recent post Ah, God. You have such a sense of humor.

Well, Justin, for what it's worth...I appreciate you. Your posts this week have been hard and some of the best you've written since I've followed you but they're necessary. You're right...people don't need to go through the hell you and I have experienced in our lives to get to where you are in life.

Honestly, you're an inspiration to a guy like me who God has chosen not to bring as far back from hell as he has with you. You give me hope that my life might someday be better than the meaningless survival of the day that it is right now. I'll be joining in your prayer because I don't want anyone else to have to walk the path I've had to go down.