Taking Time to Get Started
It has taken me a considerable amount of time to get clarity on what I should do next. The Standard now reaches about 30,000 people a year, and visitors like you stay on the site for over 2 minutes, which is over 2,500 hours of reading. It seems now is a good time to introduce The Trimmed Lamps Blog.
With so many pastors, preachers, speakers, other voices, and YouTubers, all available online and very accessible, I felt I had little more to offer. I certainly didn't want to deliver a stream of consciousness or sit there pointing at other people's YouTube videos others to increase my channels watch time without actually creating content.
After many years of wondering what's next? This week it became clear to me what I should be doing, admittedly after having asked the Holy Spirit.
The Standard and its content communicate faith in Jesus and how I understand it. You would have perhaps read my opinion and seen the lengths I've gone to my research, but the key point is to communicate from a personal perspective and not one from a pulpit or a wannabe creator to try and earn some cash through adverts.
On one hand some might call me a conspiracy theorist, but who cares (is it even the right terminology these days as it all seems to be coming true!), my focus is on Jesus and life is about attempting to make sense of what is going on around us and to also have an opinion on who's saying what and not blindly agree and follow.
But it's not just an opinion I'm writing about now, it's also about us, and by that, I mean Liz, my wife and I. How we live, what we've been doing over the past few years, what's happened to us that has framed our perception and focus, and what we're planning to do in the years to come. Even if we do have some surprising opinions on eschatology, as in the end times.
Why Trimmed Lamps?
The title of this blog is called Trimmed Lamps. And for those who don't know, Jesus spoke the parable of the ten virgins and their lamps. The ten virgins is a reference to the Ten Commandments. Five kept the oil to make sure their lamps trimmed, with oil, and ready for His return. And five did not. The ones who did not are aligned to those following the law and the ones that kept their lamps trimmed and full of oil are the ones accepting Him, the new covenant, and being filled with Holy Spirit. Matthew 25:1-13.
We are expected to live in a state of preparedness and anticipate Jesus' return, even though the Bible says no one knows the time or date except the Father. To most, their belief is that we are still awaiting his return, post crucifixion, 2,000 years later. To others, He has already returned once post crucifixion in 70AD, and now, we are awaiting the third coming of Christ.
To understand a little more about this, take a read of this article about Biblical Timelines.
Overall, regarding this blog, we have a multitude of subjects we're planning to cover:
- Faith: how we live as a married, born-again, couple
- Family: how we navigate and compartmentalise friction and non-friction situations
- Reviewing current affairs, events, and times
- Baptism and why it's important
- Health: Food, glorious food, from a carnivore’s perspective (the diet, not the animal!)
- House, home and hills: How we live a what we do
- Work (Me): As an entrepreneur, creator and B2B business owner, from daily issues affecting our well-being, to, sales, marketing and everything in-between
- Work (Liz): As an employee, working with others and how faith impacts Lizs' job
Like I said, I hope you find this blog interesting, if only from the perspective of born-again believers writing about how we live and interpret the Bible in our everyday lives.
