Your blog (short for ‘Web Log’) is ultimately yours to do with what you will over the next year, but we want to make sure you're aware of its potential.
Your blog can be a very, very powerful part of your ministry over this next year; but ultimately, it will be what you make it.
You’d be amazed at the stories that come out of just the ministry that the World Race has cultivated through it’s blogs – after all, how’d you get here? And how many blogs have you read since you learned about the World Race?
We believe that we are creative beings because we are made in the image of the Creator – the ultimate Creative Being. We also believe that we are living story-worthy lives because, well, Jesus:
“He was never without a story when He spoke.”
Mark 4:34,MSG
Over the next year you’ll often say the hard thing for the sake of love, you’ll stay when you want to leave, you’ll lend a hand when every fiber of your being wants to look away, you’ll speak compassionate words of life and encouragement even when your words can barely make it out through the grief catching in your throat.
There is a story worth telling in each of those moments.
Think about this: your families, friends, acquaintances, and people from way-back-when, whom you’d never think will find your blog but somehow do, will have access to these stories because you tell them.
With your blog, you can bring an otherwise unseen world to light. You have access to mass-communication media, and you have a free platform to use, to bring awareness and hope for the beautiful ones you’re about to meet, the lives you’re about to become part of.
You get to use this thing to invite others into the heartache you see on the field, yes; but you also get to invite them into solutions! You get to use it to document, and you get to use it to pass the story along. Once you leave Nepal, Honduras, Malaysia, or Romania; your story there may be over.
That could be just the beginning of one of your readers' stories there, though!
We believe that statistics are good, and awareness is a good step – but that actually telling the stories of the lives that you witness and become a part of as you walk through this journey, will make connections where statistics often can’t: the heart.
Statistics often don’t move people to action, stories do.
The reality of 27 million slaves can easily breed hopelessness without offering concrete hope that we can change that number.
If we start telling the story of the fourth-grader who was invited out of the sex trade in the Philippines just two weeks after she was forced into it, sharing that the invitation came from a 21-year-old girl who went on the World Race to see more of Jesus – then maybe more of us will start to believe in the truth that Jesus really has asked us to be part of ending slavery, to care for the orphans and widows, and to be light in the darkness!
Over the next two weeks I’m going to be sharing some very basic blogging tips with you.
If using your blog as part of your Race experience to impact not just the places you're going, but your home as well, is something you’re interested in – stay tuned!
We want to help you do this the very best that you can!
