West Virginia blogs

Check out this partial list of blogs from around the state of West Virginia.

I welcome all comments. Feel free to comment on-page, or e-mail feedback to CandidChristian@gmail.com.

More thoughts on the prosperity "gospel"

Just came across a great new blogger...and a great post. I couldn't agree more.

I welcome all comments. Feel free to comment on-page, or e-mail feedback to CandidChristian@gmail.com.

BlogCarolinas Social Media/Web 2.0 conference

Spending a few days in Raleigh, North Carolina, to learn more about promoting my online presence/reputation and to see what implications it could have for 1) Internet evangelism/ministry and 2) the new career God has blessed me with. Can't wait to get back to blogging on a regular basis when I get back.

Grace and Peace...

Happy Birthday

I officially joined the blogosphere two years ago today. Actually, this is my second blog; the first was an experiment in which I had hoped to build an online community for a Sunday School class I taught. But that eventually petered out.

Still, I enjoyed writing the blog and figured I would use a new blog as another sort of experiment, this one in 21st century evangelism. Over time, I've realized that the World Wide Web i s just another mission field. It's no different than spending time in a Third World jungle, or going door-to-door in my neighborhood. Indeed, the potential for Internet evangelism is much, much larger: there are millions upon millions of people crusing the information superhighway, and if just a minute fraction of those people stumble across the site and learn about Jesus, it makes it all worth it, yes? Especially considering I enjoy it anyway? I think so.

Now, over time things have sort of evolved. At times it's been a confessional, other times its been a Web portal to deliver other evangelical information and, at still other times, I've used it as a political platform (after initially saying I'd never do so). But at the heart of what I'm attempting to do is simple: I just want to tell people about Jesus. He changed my life. I know He can change yours.

So, just for a stroll down memory lane, I'm re-posting my first blog entry--which might be cringe-inducing prose for all I remember. But, again, I've not done this for any gain of my own, but that others might come to know a little bit more about Jesus.

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“ I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. ”- Galatians 2:20

They say confession is good for the soul ... yeah, no kidding, right?I thought I'd create this blog to share my daily experiences with the risen Christ -- good and bad. Like most Christians, my walk is full of ups and downs, highs and lows, mountaintops and valleys. Know the feeling?

I don't really know where all of this will go. I just want to write about the God who saved and redeemed me. So, I'll start with my testimony. On Sept. 12, 1982, I was just a boy -- six years old, loving G.I. Joe, Transformers and the woods in my backyard. Life was complete, inasmuch as it can be for a child two months shy of seven. Yet, sitting in the pew that Sunday night, something stirred within me. I somehow knew that there was something missing in my life. I didn't know what to call it then, but I know now: I had the same God-shaped void inherent in all our lives. I needed Him. More specifically, I needed to accept the gift of salvation Jesus offered by His death on the cross of Calvary. As best as I can remember, my mother sat beside me, and I saddled up to her and said I wanted to go to the church altar and receive Christ in my life. The choir was singing, my grandfather -- our church's pastor -- sitting in the front pew directly in front of me. He led me to the altar, and I remembered the A-B-Cs of salvation, as the Apostle Paul outlined in his epistle to the Romans, chapter 10, verses 9 and 10." ... That if you confess with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."Ask, Believe, Confess. I did all three, and my life has never been the same.

There have, to be sure, been problems in my Christian walk. I rebelled against Him in college and spent 10 years living a life of rampant sin. I was into drinking, drugs. From about the age of 18 until 28, I knew little about the God who saved me because my sin precluded Him from having a direct, day-to-day impact on my life. I use this analogy: what would you do if your best friend in the whole world, abruptly and with little warning, quit calling you? You'd probably call them anyway, right? You'd say something like, "Hey, how have you been ... miss seeing you. When can we hang?" But, eventually, if those calls weren't returned, those visits never reciprocated, you'd quit, yes? Oh, you'd still love your best friend. You'd still miss them. You might even tell others to say "hello," but that contact would be distant, incorporeal. That was my relationship to God. After years of rampant sin, he just quit calling.

On August 31, 2003, I broke my back. I won't go into details here -- maybe I will later. But God used that moment to wake me up, to show me that I was nothing without Him, that my life was only a fraction of what it could be if only I'd allow Christ free reign with my thoughts ... and actions. A few weeks later while recuperating, I got down on my knees, bent over as much as I could with my 20-pound back brace and asked Him to forgive me of all that I'd done. Here's the amazing thing. Remember that friend analogy? As humans, we naturally hold grudges. I've gone in and out of friendships with people for many reasons, and I'm sad to say some of the breaks happened through things I'd done. That was the case of my friendship with Jesus. He never holds a grudge, nor does He care that it took a serious, life-threatening injury to get me to wake up to the reality of what my life had become. He doesn't care what my life was like while I was running away from Him and toward my own selfish desires ... the only thing He cares about was what I could have been accomplishing for Him in the time that I was following my own path.

So, I guess that's what part of this is. It's my way of trying to get those years back ... I've got a lot of catching up to do, a lot of lives to impact for Jesus. I was too busy with myself back then.

I want to be busy with Jesus now.

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Nuts and bolts

Don't you just love to say it?

It's not my fault. It's not my fault. It's not my fault. Man, that feels good. After all, it seems our culture places a value on never taking responsibility for one's actions. Hey, it's one of the seven steps to a better you, or one of the five steps to unlocking your inner potential, or one of the 15 steps to finding your life's purpose which, of course, involves driving an expensive, gas-guzzling SUV! You deserve it! Feel good about yourselves, folks...you're not to blame! Yay!

(Wow. Don't know where that came from. Sorry...it's 4 a.m. and I can't sleep.)

But, in this case, it's really not my fault. In fact, it's Google's fault...that you can't comment on my blog anymore.

Here's the deal: because I want CandidChristian.com to have some semblance of design originality, I chose the option of being able to manipulate the HTML coding back when Blogger let you do that sort of thing. Maybe if Blogger's available templates were any good--or if there were more than 15 or so from which to choose--I'd stick with theirs. But probably not.

I digress. There are two ramifications as a result of my choosing to handle my own coding. No. 1, I have very little idea what I'm doing, so my rudimentary HTML design skills consists of little more than high-tech trial-and-error. It's also why the sidebar looks as cluttered as a 14 year-old's bedroom. And, two, it means that I can't get as good tech support from Blogger simply because my template, after tons and tons of changes by a rank amateur (yep, that's me), is a mess that would take a skilled hand indeed to clean up.

So, when I realized that no one could comment on the site--and that's a big problem for me, especially in light of the social media blitz I've been doing for the past few months as a way to boost traffic and tell more people about Jesus--I simply assumed it was because I'd screwed up somewhere. And when I tried to sort through all of this massive coding, I was hopelessly lost trying to find a fix.

But it's not my fault. Or, at least if it is, my only fault is in deciding to stick with my own template instead of picking a cookie cutter look that, while easy to maintain, is terribly boring. See, there's a bug on Blogger. When they did some tinkering back in February--having the nerve to call it "bug fixing"--a glitch developed in which bloggers who have their own unique template no longer had access to Blogger's comment pagination system.

The good news is that it's one of Blogger's "known issues." The bad news is that it's been a problem since early February, and these things are usually fixed by now.

S0, while it's not my fault--lovin' sayin' that--it's still my problem. Isn't that the way it always works.

Please, then, use e-mail to CandidChristian@gmail.com to comment, I'll then approve and re-post here. Or, you're always welcome--and encouraged--to use the social media buttons below.

Grace and peace...