Brandon Gilliland

Just wanted to go for a little humor today! I don’t think I have ever shared this video on the site before…but it is just so funny! Enjoy!

What did you think of the video?

 [This post is part of the "Defining Character" series.]

I am sure that most of you who are reading this value character. As Christ followers, our character should represent Christ. This post is really setting the foundation for the framework of this series. So now we get to the big question:

What’s the Difference Between Reputation and Character?

According to the dictionary, we get the following definitions:

Reputation: overall quality or character as seen or judged by people in general

Character:  the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual

In the last post, An Individual With Character Must Have Morals, we discussed how good morals must be present in order to have good character. If you take a look at the definitions above, you will notice that reputation is simply what others think of you. It is important for others to think highly of you, but if it is not the truth, then it is a huge problem! Character, in contrast to reputation, is the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual. Character is what someone is actually about! 

This month was great! I think that the site really grew a lot this month…thanks to everyone! I did want to share some stats with you all so you could get a feel for how much God has blessed this site this month. For the month of May, the site added many new subscribers to raise the total to 29 subscribers! I’m really excited about that number! Also, pageviews remained steady at a little over 3,300 this month!

I was also able to give away two free ads for this month to some lucky winners. You can check out their awesomesauce ads on the sidebar on the right!

Also, the month of May marked the start of the new “Defining Character” series. I’m really excited about the posts coming out later this week on that! If you haven’t checked out the intro posts for this series, you can check them out here!

The top 5 posts for May:

• Life Lessons From Tiny Wings
• When There’s Only 1 Banana Left
• Defining Character

So I just wanted to take this time on a wonderful Tuesday to talk about awesome blogs. I follow 40+ blogs out there that are really good. Many of the are on my links page.

For this, just leave links for the awesomesauce blogs you follow. You can also leave links to yours as well! Let’s see what we can come up with!

You can leave links/suggestions here!

So today, I was able to have the chance to go to the not-so-local guitar center to just try out different things. I went it wanting to try amps, but I mainly went in to just get new strings and cables. When I was trying out some awesome PRS, Gibson, and Fender guitars, I was excited!

One of the highlights of the day was getting to play through an Egnater amp. Here is a picture of it below:

This amp had an unbelievable sound! One of the best amps I have ever played- and trust me, I have played a lot. Now, I am just gonna have to save up for about a year to get this thing!

It was awesome to play through this amp today though…the cool thing was that the guitar guy let me crank it up all the way and blast the volume through out the store! I only hit a few chords because I felt bad that I was blowing out the place!

“Unless we rely on God’s power within us, we will yield to the pressures around us.”

So here’s a round up of the week. There were a lot of great articles published this week!

Is The Holy Spirit Moving In Our Services? -A great post from david Santistevan!

Seven Steps To Writing A Successful Guest Post- Awesome strategies for guest posting given by Jeff Goins. Anyone want to guest post on here???

Right Place, Right Time, Right Heart- Great post by Randy Kinnick about influence.

The Shallow Small Group- Below is a hilarious video about a shallow small group. Just watch and laugh!

I’ve been really diggin’ this song lately! Enjoy!

Alright! I’m excited to launch the free ad contest of June. Like last time, I will be giving away 2 free 300 x 150 ad spots on the sidebar. I think that the May ad contest went really well! We had a lot of submissions.

The winners of the month of May were:

• Randy Kinnick
• Larry Hehn       

Hopefully, these guys got some extra traffic from the ad…I know some of my friends found their sites from it! So here’s how to enter into the contest:

All you have to do to win is enter in the following ways:

• Leave a comment below- I will only count 1 comment per person…
• Subscribe via email- If you have already subscribed through the email, I will count that already (because the email subscribers are awesome!)…that means that if you haven’t, you are missing 1 extra chance!
• Twitter a link back to this site- If you want to be awesome, you can do this! (Just make sure you provide a link to it…)

[This is the first part of the Defining Character series. If you haven't already, please check out the intro posts for this series here.]

So I am really excited to launch this new series. I believe that God has some great content being developed already. In the “Intro to Character Series” post, we discussed what character itself means.

Character: the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual

If you look at the definition above, you will notice that character contains the “mental” and “moral” qualities distinctive to an individual. Character means a lot of things. In order to get down to the details of what character entails, we must understand and have morals (or convictions) that represent Christ.

Morals: principles or habits with respect to right or wrong conduct.

You see, our morals must reflect our convictions…which ultimately these should reflect Christ. In our world today, character is not prevalent. Although most individuals do not care about standing by convictions, they do respect the select few that do stand by their convictions.