Three Hundred

I have been writing this blog since April 6, 2004. I wrote 70 posts in 2004, 147 posts in 2005 and I'm up to 83 posts in 2006. To celebrate my three hundredth post, I have updated my blog template. The Archive section in the right-hand menu is now grouped by year and I have new Blog Labels that I have started to implement. (I made no colour changes, I like to keep the visuals simple and clean.)

As a summary of my blog life, I want to highlight the Top 10 posts that I have written about lessons that I have learned. These are not necessarily my favourite posts and I've certainly learned some crucial things about which I have never written. Still, one of my main purposes for this blog is to use it as an online journal of my personal and spiritual growth and that's why this list is so important to me.

10. Personality Traits
I periodically do some self-analysis just to learn more about myself. In this post, I dissected the fact that many personality traits have both a good side and a bad side and maturity means accentuating the beneficial parts while softening the hard edge. In this post, I reviewed my own personality traits to see how each was useful and harmful. I've also done some Jung Tests, analyzed my conversation skills (and here), talked about my introversion and how I came to be the strong and silent type. As I said before, I think that Christians are naturally trained to analyze themselves regularly.

9. Big Brothers
In September 2005, I found that I had a deep desire for mentoring but no outlet. I was done leading my own cell group, the youth worship team at FCCC was over and my youngest friends had all grown up. That's when I accidentally bumped into the idea of becoming a Big Brother. In January 2006, I finally got around to attending some meetings and I did an interview with them. This is the post in which I announced that I was now a Big. I've been hanging out with my Little once a week ever since then (more than a year and a half now) and I love him.

8. Swim Deeper
In this post, I interpreted a dream that I had as a message from God. We need to explore our lives until we have found our calling and purpose. Once we have it, we need to get deeper into it and we can't remain superficial, floating around on the surface. As I look at this, I recognize that this is a post that I should review more regularly since I needed this reminder today. In this case, though, the message wasn't as important to me as the method. I frequently have dreams that I do not understand and some of these dreams actually end up happening later, which is just weird. This is the first time that I am certain that God spoke to me through a dream, though.

7. Spiritual Power
Over the last year, I have been randomly asking people these questions: As a Christian, have you been baptized in the Holy Spirit? Do you speak in tongues? Do you speak in tongues regularly? I followed that up with some analysis (here and here), though not everyone agreed with my conclusions given the various types of theologies amongst my readers. Where is the power in our Christian lives? Are we just nice people doing good deeds or does God really show up in our lives? We need more of the Holy Spirit and my challenge to myself and others is to not accept a mediocre faith in God.

6. Change For The Sake Of Others
In this post, I talk about the Biblical mandate to change aspects about ourselves, to develop new skills or interests and to let go of some of our minor rules. We do this so that we can communicate and relate to others better. If we insist on doing things our own way all the time and refuse to change, it can be very tough to develop relationships with people. We need to compromise ourselves.

5. On The Margins
As a member of Abe's small group for two years or so, he impressed upon me the importance of reaching out to people on the margins of our society. I followed up on that idea by talking about how spending time with people is more important giving money.

4. Leadership Growth Spurt
This post talks about how leaders will naturally grow and learn through their roles as leaders. More than that, I suggested that everyone needs to be become a leader at some point, because it's our responsibility and because there is only so much personal growth we can acheive as followers. I described one aspect of my own growth as a leader in terms of realizing that encouragement from a leader is crucial.

3. Lessons of Discipleship
I told my story about how I came to realize, at the age of twenty-one, that I needed to develop more meaningful friendships and that I remain so superficial. I gradually saw the need for mentors and I decided to jump into the pool and become one myself rather than wait for one to come to me. This two part series (Part I and Part II) summarizes some of the lessons I learned over the years while trying to be a mentor to others.

2. Lessons From The Office
During 2005, I started to make the link between lessons that I had learned in my professional life with lessons that applied to my spiritual life. I started to see how alike churches and businesses can be. I began this series to get some of those lessons down as text and I have now grouped all of those posts into my new "Professional Life" blog label. I would highlight this post about the fact that everyone has an emotional bank account and we need to be aware of how our actions effect the morale of others.

1. Character & Hope
In this post, I talk about the biggest lesson that I ever learned from my professional career. Character is what you develop in the tough times. By my estimation, this was one of the darkest and most frustrating times of my life. On an emotional basis, this was the hardest thing that I ever had to learn and it took an awfully long time for me to learn it. I can only thank God that he led me through that period and made something good come of it.