What I learned at Relevant {& #Relevant11 Stalker Link-Up!}

That title may be a little misleading. You see, I didn't go to Pennsylvania for The Relevant Conference.

But I was a stalker. Yes, you heard right. A stalker. I stalked the #Relevant11 twitter feed the whole weekend. Who knew you could glean so much from eavesdropping on social media? Although~ it wasn't really eavesdropping. It was women sharing their hearts… and women sharing what God was using to impact them. And it impacted many others.

It was very timely, really. I was finishing up thirty-one days of posts for my 31 Days series. God was stirring up some ideas about what I should spend my time doing. Relevant intensified that stirring.

photo credit

There are sooo many quotes that I could share with you from the Twitter feed, but it would be a blog post that looked like The Iliad. Not so good.

So I thought I would share with you those morsels that keep coming to my mind. It is important for you to know that these morsels, as I spit them out, are not likely to be any one quote by any one particular person. It seemed to me that so many of the speakers shared the same message; encased in different words, but the same theme, the same thought.

Share YOU
Share the real you in every post. Blogging is serving others. It's about giving yourself away. It's a ministry. Your readers have come to your party, to your dinner table. Serve the one who is there and don't worry about the ones who couldn't come. They have come to see you, to hear from you. We are building relationships.

Pray for your readers. Pray for your blog. God has a purpose in it. God wants to use it. Therefore, I must be real before my readers. Real, transparent, and honest. Then God can use me.

Sisterhood
Don't let a competitive spirit get in the way of serving who you were created to serve. Don't let comparison steal your joy. Comparison steals our ability to build true sisterhood.

When we work together, God takes our small things and makes them into big things.

We are called to encourage one another.

That doesn't really seem like a lot by the space it takes up on the screen, does it? These lines seem to be the rich cream that has come to the surface. There are other, more practical morsels within my notes, but these are the words which hold the most weight– the most eternal importance. These are the words that build community, and that is the place where we can impact lives. That is how we impact the Kingdom.

I really need a few hours of quiet to finish processing all of this information and to hear from God. I need to begin to feel out the steps that I take from here, with these lessons as my flashlight. The first thing that jumps out at me is that I need to join a network. I need a little bloggy group of girlfriends. The next thing that jumps out to me is that I want to get to know my readers better. I want to get to know you better.

If you learned a lot at Relevant this year~ without leaving home~ I would like to invite you to link up your blog post here so that we can all visit one another. Sharing stories is the beginning of community, right?

(Please link up using the url for your individual post, rather than the url for your home page.)

This link-up is being co-hosted by Ashley at LIFE by Ashley Pichea, so be sure that you stop by her blog and leave her a comment, too.When you leave your link at one of our blogs, it will show up on both blogs.