In my reboot post of this blog, I did something I hadn’t done before. I laid out the focus of my blog. In the past, I kept it pretty vague, as if that would give me license to write about things outside of a set of parameters. To be honest with you, I set up needless boundaries for myself all too often and I tear down important boundaries too often as well.
I think that one helpful way to live within the good boundaries of life is to live intentionally. And one helpful way to live intentionally is to come out and say that this is your goal. There are many ways to do this. I know many families from church who have a household mission statement displayed in a prominent place in their homes. If you ask any of them, not a one of them will say that they wish they hadn’t put their intentionalities on display.
The closest thing to this commonly found in a blog format is in the tag line. Look around at your favorite blogs. The blog name is usually followed by a short, pithy statement intended to hold a lot of meaning in just a few words. Kind of like Twitter, I suppose.
My original tag line is kind of embarrassing now, but at the time I thought I was pretty clever.
CoffeeSwirls is the minty fresh blog of Doug McHone, which snaps back wash after wash!
Yeah. Pretty lame. I kept that for a while. Then I changed my focus in life and spun some rhetorical hula hoops and came up with the tag line that I kept for several years.
Walking the Path of Least Resistance
It was shorter, which is good. It was provocative, which can be good. The trouble is, I spent more time defending it than I should have. I eventually wrote a post for the sole purpose of defending an admittedly poorly written tagline. But, to quote the great prophet Tom Petty, I was a rebel without a clue, and I enjoyed the mental gymnastics. Shorter, good. More complicated, bad.
So for this relaunch, I looked to Mark 12:28-31 as a good tagline inspiration and went with the tagline “heart. soul. mind. strength.” for almost 24 hours. Why would something that concise, biblical and simple only last that long? Because it is incomplete.
Loving God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength and loving your neighbor as yourself are wonderful goals that everyone should have. But let’s not forget that Jesus described these commandments as the linchpin statements that hold the entire law together. Jesus was speaking to the experts in the Mosaic law, men living under that law, having no other option because their sins had not been placed upon Jesus on the cross. The law had not been fulfilled in Christ. The gospel was still a promise.
On this side of the resurrection, we have the fullness of the gospel to fall upon when we fail to meet the good standards of the law. To say that my only focus for this blog is to follow the law is dishonoring to the savior who took my sins upon himself. And to be clear, saying that I should sin that grace may abound is just as dishonoring to my savior.
So for the time being, the tagline of CoffeeSwirls will be thus:
heart. soul. mind. strength. gospel.
I think it celebrates the newness of life that is a parallel to the fresh start that my life is undergoing. I like it. What do you think?
It’s good to have you back, Doug. 🙂
It’s good to be back. I’m a different guy than I used to be, but I believe it is all for the better. Or at least it will become for the better.
Good thoughts, Doug. If nothing else, the question remains if anyone loves God that way? And since we don’t, doesn’t that push us towards the gospel message of Christ?
Exactly. If the law is summed up in loving God and neighbor to the fullest then failing to love God and neighbor is the foundation of sin. Thus the need for gospel.