I came up with the weirdest analogy this morning as I was checking my emails: growing in faith and spiritually is like building up your blog. And the funny thing is, I keep making the same mistakes in both.

Let’s talk about blogging first. What is the most fundamental key to building up your readership and backlinks? It’s by writing quality entries consistently and interacting with your readers. Sure, there are many other methods to help you achieve the goal, like seo, link exchanges, having a nice layout, etc, but without the fundamental basics, no matter what else you do, you can only get so far before your readership and hits start dwindling again. All those other steps are supportive measures you can take to help you reach the goal faster, but them alone will not turn your site into a celebrity blog.

Relate that to your spiritual growth. There are two basic things you must do in order to grow as a Christian, and you’ve probably heard it a million times: read your bible and pray. Not just flipping to a random page and reading a random verse or saying your graces before meals, but actually taking time out each day to spend reading God’s words, medidating on them, talking to Him, and just spending time in His presence. Then there are the retreats, the conferences, the Christian books, the sermons; all these are great opportunities and tools that can help you in your spiritual growth, but without the fundamentals, those alone will only keep the firing burning for so long. You can’t depend the spiritual high you get from retreats to keep you going, it just doesn’t work that way.

My problem with both? I reverse the steps. I rely on the tools to boost my enthusiasm, then I go back to the basics, only to lose interest in a couple weeks. With blogging, I get excited everytime I upload a new design, then I tryout all these crazy methods to bring in hits, visitors, and now cash, AND THEN I start posting. With my spiritual walk, I’d get the high from a retreat or conference, then be all on fire for God and buy all these great Christian books, AND THEN I start doing my quiet time and praying. Needless to say, the end result is always me losing my enthusiasm and fire and having to start this yo-yo process all over again.

If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work.
- 1 Corinthians 3:12-13

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