Three Sticks — Something for Everyone

At the same time, I wanted to make sure that I reached the largest possible audience. This meant that I would have to cultivate an audience of believers and non-believers. I thought that in order to build a mixed audience that I would have to down play my faith. I didn’t want to alienate non-Christians. You can see in my first couple of posts ironically titled, My Ministry: Part 1 - Origin and My Ministry: Part 2 - Purpose, that I attempted to straddle a very fine line in order to reach both audiences.I didn’t feel comfortable in making that choice. I felt that in someway I was denying my heavenly father. However, like so many times in life, I did what many of us do, I ignored that feeling and went forward. Whenever we do that he always lovingly shows us the errors of our ways. I continued to write articles and each one became more openly Christian. I simply couldn’t find a way to express what was in my heart without referencing my faith.

After writing a few articles, I began to promote Three Sticks. All the successful bloggers know that site promotion is an ongoing activity that never ends. Of course the most important element to promoting your site is the quality of your articles / posts.

My goal was to increase the traffic of the site beyond family and friends. The goal of every blogger. Unfortunately being a newbie, my plan to promote the site was pretty weak. However, God has continued to present opportunities to increase the reach of Three Sticks. First, I stumbled upon Ring Surf and decided to join some of the webrings listed there. Although I had plans to write articles on technology and entrepreneurship, most of what I had written was about applying Christian principles to life. So I naturally chose to join some Christian webrings. With this one decision I had publicly declared that Three Sticks was a Christian blog.

After being accepted by some of the Christian webrings, I decided to jump start my traffic by submitting some of my articles for inclusion in blog carnivals. I have been pleasantly surprised that although there is a strong Christian theme in my articles, they have been included in half a dozen secular blog carnivals. This tells me that there is an audience for God’s Word.

After experiencing these two examples, I knew it was time to work on my mindset. I reread one of my favorite scriptures, Mark 8:34 - 38, and realized that by not being open and public about the nature and intent of the site that I was being disobedient and lacked faith in God’s direction for my life. I somehow became unconsciously trapped into thinking that it was my efforts that made the difference rather than God’s favor. I have asked for forgiveness and changed the tag line of the site from simply Empowering, Teaching, Healing to Empowering, Teaching, Healing - A Christian Personal Development site.

Much of what is written here at Three Sticks is based on my life. I believe that God is using my life as an example to help others know him. It’s not that I am special in and of myself, but that he has given me talents and abilities and imbued me with a purpose to help others. I can show you how he has loved me when I didn’t love myself, protected me when I didn’t know right from wrong and helped me when I couldn’t see the difference between good and evil. My goal is to tell my story and show you how you can overcome your own fear, develop your relationship with him and become a happy and fulfilled person. Becoming a healthy and fulfilled person is all encompassing and touches every aspect of your life. Hence the personal development portion of the tagline. One of my goals is to provide you with tools to help you free yourself from the mundane concerns of this world (money to live, petty grievances etc) so that you can focus on your own God given path. We will spend time talking about business, technology, investing and other subjects that will allow you to develop passive revenue sources so that money is no longer a constraint in living your life. All of this is possible if you have faith and become an obedient servant. As I write this, I am working on developing my own sources of passive revenue so that I do not make the mistake of getting trapped in the concerns of this world. I believe that it will happen because my motive is to do God’s will. He will make it possible for me.

Although, I am the administrator and primary author for this site, I am on the same journey as everyone else. Some of the people who read this site will be ahead of me, others keeping pace and other just getting started. I hope that we will all learn from each other.

Trackback URL for this post.