Pam Padgett ... teacher
A little more than two years ago Joan was given a dream which showed
to start a blog for sharing messages for the church. Joan asked me to
set up the blog (this blog).
I was very willing to do this, but didn't know what a blog was or how
to go about setting one up. So I prayed and asked God for wisdom ...
James 1:5 If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that
giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given
him.
After praying, I looked on the internet to find out about blogs and
see what we would need to start one. I found there were sites available with tools to setup a blog, and we would not need to have our own
computer to run it and store messages. I was so happy to learn this! (Having worked as a programmer at a
large corporation for many years, I had assumed we would need a computer to
run the blog and a place to store the messages. This could take some
time to setup and maintain.)
But which site should we use? (I asked God) A thought came from the Holy Spirit that we needed something "simple".
This was a strong guide for me. As I had looked at the various sites, one site stood out because it had some screen templates that were very simple, not elaborate. I setup a sample blog on that site and
was surprised how easy it was to do this. Then I
started checking more deeply into this site and found that we could
publish as many messages as we wanted, and there was no cost. Amazing!
I showed Joan what I thought would be just a first draft for the blog. We also walked through how to
write and publish messages on it. The blog looked fine, and the tools for writing and publishing messages were complete and easy to
use. After making a few minor changes, we started using the blog immediately. This
was just a couple days after Joan was first given the dream to setup a
blog.
But how would people be able to find the blog? Being a new blog, Google did not display it on the first several pages
of most searches. Researching this I found it could be complex and take months
before searches would display our blog on the first page or two.
Again, I prayed and was reminded of having seen something about advertising.
Ads could be setup to display on the screen when searches are done.
Although there was a cost for the ads, the ministry had plenty of money
to pay for ads. The site we had chosen even allowed very easy linking with the ads. Within a week
the ads were displaying and people all over the world were finding the
blog.
At times along the way it looked like this assignment might be hard or complex in some way. But the wisdom from God gave what was needed and showed easier ways than seemed possible at first.
James 3:17 But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.
Not only was the blog easy to setup and use, but it makes messages available to people all over the world.
Certainly God knew this when HE gave the dream to Joan showing to start
the blog. But we hadn't realized the world-wide visibility until we were using it. This was much farther reaching than we had grasped at first, far
better than we ever imagined!