“You’re a musician. Are you playing to please the audience? Or are you playing to please the conductor?” ~ Steve Case

In my particular case the audience is you guys who follow me here or elsewhere. The conductor is God, of course!

I started this journey as a means to heal my soul. I never expected to gain an audience. An introvert does NOT want an audience. Yet here I am. This thing inside of me, my inner voice, tells me to continue sharing no matter how awkward it feels sometimes. I did something way out of my comfort zone a few days ago and made my first Periscope broadcast. I threatened to do that a year ago but fear held me back. I tremble at the thought of public speaking. But I have been feeling God wanting me to step out of my comfort zone in many ways lately and that is one area…so I finally took a first step. It wasn’t exactly pretty but I did it. I actually had to look at my notes to remember the name of this website! That’s how much anxiety I get when I think about talking to a group of people. It is something I have always dealt with and I am trying to overcome. (This is one of those other fears I was referring to the other day on my blog about my fear of falling). You cannot live in fear AND have faith though.

Putting yourself out there with the goal of gaining attention to pump up your ego is one thing. But putting yourself out there to please God is another. I follow MANY inspirational people on social media myself because I need to hear their messages and reminders. We are working together to bring glory to God. That is how it should be anyway. I shared a blog Sunday for my friend Luke who started a sponsorship program in Central Asia for underprivileged children. I have been promoting that story every day on Twitter this week. A few days ago one of my friends who has 182K followers retweeted my post. Now that is a BLESSING!!! Imagine the potential readers his story may have reached?

But. Bigger is not always necessarily better. I checked my subscriber service just now out of curiosity and this little blog only has 35 readers as of today. (And one of those sign ups is ME 🙂 ) It had 160+ new hits last week but those people didn’t choose to stick around for whatever reason. And you know what? That is okay. If the messages here do not resonate I don’t expect those people to come back. There are a million blogs out there with a million different messages that might speak to them more so than mine. I admit I got caught up in trying to grow my platform last year after being advised to do so at a conference. There is nothing wrong with that, if done for the right reasons. My reason was to grab attention of publishers, which didn’t happen. I do believe it has helped me focus more on my purpose. But what I also know is this…if God is going to use you it doesn’t matter if you have 2 people listening to your message or 2 million. He is in control and it is going to happen in His way and in His time.

So, whatever you are doing…let’s keep the ego in check. Remember the purpose is to please The Conductor and draw others closer to Him. That is it. That is everything…

Blessings,

Stacey ~ iamalive