Brandon Gilliland

Just wanted to let the readers here know that I set up my twitter account this afternoon. I have been asked for awhile now to get one, but I had to wait until I finished my current semester in school. Well, that ended today! So, I will be posting updates there as well. My twitter name is: @bgilliland94.

You can follow me @bgilliland94! With twitter, I can now share more with the readers here. Plus, it will allow me to post more quality content here on the site.

Stay tuned for more posts!

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A common fear that almost every musician has when it comes to live performances, involves having some piece of gear fail during a live set. I have had many things happen to me when I have played live. Most every musician who  regularly performs live can testify to this fear.

I have:

• broken strings (this is bad because your whole guitar goes out of tune, and you can not play the same chords)
• fried cables
• dropped picks (this always happens when my picks are not easily accessible!)
• had a guitar break
• short-circuited pedals (bad…just bad…)
• had mics go out
• had tubes blow (this is always bad because the sound can not travel out of your amp)

Out of all of these things, I am glad to say that I have not fallen on stage…only at practice! The point of mentioning all of things things is that they can not be controlled. No matter how much one prepares or insures that the gear is quality, these things can still happen. Learning to deal with these situations properly is important.

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A few short weeks ago, my website was stagnant. On the old domain, I was pouring my heart and soul into each post, and it was not reaching anyone. I had gone from an average of 250 unique visitors per day to barely 30 page views. This period of time was hard for me because I had to make a decision. In essence, my blog had grown stagnant. It was at this point that I needed to make the decision to remain content with the situation or try to find a way around it. After much thought, I decided to move the blog over here. It was a hard move. I had no clue what I was doing.

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A new song that I have been leading with my worship band is called “White Flag”. It is a song by Chris Tomlin that focuses on the theme of surrender. It is really a great song, and it is applicable to every Christian’s life.

So often, we do things in our own strength…not God’s.  Living the Christian life, you are either fully surrendered to God with every aspect of your life, or you are not. I can assume that every Christian has been on both sides of the spectrum.

We often temporarily surrender to God, but then the…

• temptation that leads to sin controls us
• busyness of life steals our time with God
• time we once devoted to spend with God now is replaced with something else

The list can go on. The point is that in order for complete surrender to happen, we must do the following:

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I read this the other day, and I thought that it was cool. Einstein, who is known for being one of the founders of many concepts to math and science, explains how faith works. This dialogue between him and a professor is interesting to say the least.

Professor : You are a Christian, aren’t you, son ?

Student : Yes, sir.

Professor: So, you believe in GOD ?

Student : Absolutely, sir.

Professor : Is GOD good ?

Student : Sure.

Professor: Is GOD all powerful ?

Student : Yes.

Professor: My brother died of cancer even though he prayed to GOD to heal him. Most of us would attempt to help others who are ill. But GOD didn’t. How is this GOD good then? Hmm?

(Student was silent.)

Professor: You can’t answer, can you ? Let’s start again, young fella. Is GOD good?

Student : Yes.

Professor: Is satan good ?

Student : No.

Professor: Where does satan come from ?

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Yesterday, I mentioned some things that were going to be changing on the new site. If you missed that post, you can read it here. I wanted to explain in this post some of the new goals I have made for this site. I want to write out my goals, so I can refer to them for memory. I also want the community here to help the site meet some of these goals.

Goals for the First Month

• To obtain at least 20 followers

This goal might not seem huge, but it will take awhile for people to find out about the new site. Although there were 65 subscribers on the old site, not all of them will transfer over. So my goal for the first month will be 20 subscribers.

• To incorporate at least 1 guest post.

I love guest posts. I believe that it builds community. Having one guest post this month would be an awesome goal. If you are interested, please contact me!

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Hello everyone!

I’m glad you found your way over here. I am really excited to start a new journey with the website. I have been writing and thinking a lot lately about the impact of this blog. Although WordPress.com was great to me, I needed to move on. I’m so glad I did because there are so many more options with the WordPress self-hosted route.

With that said, everything on the site has moved. Pages, comments, data, etc. As far as content goes, nothing has been lost or has changed. The appearance of the site, however, has drastically changed. I am still working on it, so any suggestions would be appreciated!

Changes

In case you are new here, this website focuses on Christian life topics such as leadership, worship, music/guitars, and other random thoughts. Check out the about page for more.The site had a lot of engagement at the old place, but I am hoping that it will be even better here!

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About a week ago, I published a post titled “Is Your Blog Effectively Reaching Others?” I was really surprised to see the feedback that so many people provided in the comments section of the post. In fact, it was the top commented post in the history of this blog!

In this post, I wrote about how blogging has started to become something only bloggers take part in. When I wrote this post, I was starting to wonder if blogging was going to eventually fizzle out. With the engagement in other social networking sites, it seems that not many people want to read blogs. I don’t blame them! I do not want to sit in front of a computer all day to read every single blog post that comes across my reader. That would take forever! Instead, I believe that blog should have quality content that is worth reading.

Here were some of the comments from many of the readers in response to the post:

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I was looking through the archives of posts today. I was also analyzing that stats on the website. It came to my attention that many of the top posts on the site of all time were from guest posters. I thought that it was really cool to see that. Community is what this site is all about….

Guest posters on the site have earned a place of awesomeness!

Top Guest Posts Through 4.11.12

Jesus is Weird by Alex Humphrey

Performance or Participation? by Randy Kinnick

Failing With Success by Dan Black

Where Is My Horse? by Arny Sanchez

Heart Broken by Jon Stolpe

There are a l0t of new people here that have joined the site recently…I encourage you to check out these posts. There are still discussions going on them!

If you are ever interested in guest posting here on the site, you can contact me, and I will send you the details!

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When I first started out blogging, I wanted to get my site known. The first way for me to do this was let me friends know. After I had let my friends and family know about it, I started to get more active in the “bloggosphere”. This really helped, but I would strike up conversations with people everyday briefly mentioning my blog and the reasons behind it. After telling them about it, I would have to write down my email and blog address on a scrap piece of paper.

Professional? NO! Although I am not trying to be a professional website manager or blogger, I do want to be professional enough to be taken seriously. After a few months of doing this, I finally purchased some business cards. I can not tell you how much my site has developed from this $3.99 purchase!

Why Get Business Cards?

I have heard this question many times…especially from other bloggers who are not running their blog as a business. I say that you do not have to be running a business to have business cards. When you hand someone a card, it not only saves you and the other individual time; it also creates an image.

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