Like a lot of bloggers, I check my page stats — not religiously, but enough to know there’s daily traffic, some days more, some less. I can see people linking my site, and every so often I stumble across my name in someone else’s blogroll, which happens sometimes out of the blue and sometimes by following the links to blogs of people who leave comments. So it turns out I’m doing around 1.3GB of data per month now, or a bit more – which is a fair bit considering my site has next to no graphics on it. Traffic has grown to more than 22,000 page views last month, still on an upward trend. With blogs you still don’t always know how many are reading, because people might read entire posts at places like Planet Emergent and not actually visit, so they don’t actually appear as a page stat. I guess I don’t really get it, but what the heck, we’re having fun. Still, it makes me wonder if I can make any money off the traffic…. Anyway.
So maybe it’s time I ‘fessed up, before this gets any further out of hand. I don’t know where all of you people are coming from, though you’re all welcome to keep coming around here — I appreciate that you’re reading and all, I hope you’re being edified or at least entertained. But okay, here’s the thing: the truth is, I really don’t know anything, I’m as lost as the rest of you. Maybe more. Just thought y’all should know.
We now return to our regularly scheduled blog.
Some hours since posting this entry, I’ve decided that this phenomenon reflects the state of the emerging church conversation and has less to do with what I write. I wish I’d said that in the main post so it hit the rss feeds with the rest of the observation…
Thanks for visiting “in person”, Graham! As you noted in your blog entry, the process of keeping a blog affects one — positively, given the subject matter that bloggers like you and I tend to camp around. I feel it actually helps in spiritual formation, like keeping a journal… I know it’s been theraputic for me, in keeping with why I blog (also mentioned elsewhere).
Gratia vobis et pax,
I just wanted to take a minute to say hi. I’ve spent the last several days reading through your archives and found many of the posts helpful. I discovered you from the Detour link which I believe I found at Len’s site. The first post I read was the May 31, “Yes, It’s True” post. I could really relate with the frustration of trying to explain to friends from the old church the journey you find yourself on now. For the most part, we don’t go there because we are so often misunderstood.
Another post of yours that was really helpful to me was regarding the nature of relationships that existed only because of proximity. I have spent the past year trying to understand the devastation that happened to our relationships when we chose to leave our former church. I naively assumed that because we were still around geographically and we still loved God that the relationships wouldn’t change. However under the insinuations from the leadership there causing our reputation to come under a cloud of doubt and suspicion, we have found that even our closest relationships have become politicized with a need to prove loyalty to the senior leader.
Apart from grieving the lost relationships and recovering from the spiritual abuse, this has been an amazing journey. I still am often amazed at how differently I believe from what I believed 2 years ago when we were fully immersed in the “vision.” I think the difficulty in explaining ourselves is the fact that in the value system of those who are still immersed in traditional church culture, everything that we are pursuing looks like failure. We jokingly refer to it as our journey to nothingness, and figure if it looks insignificant, then we’re probably on the right track.
Thanks for writing. I’ll keep reading.