Why did the Chick-Fil-A cross the road? To maximize his potential hits...

Not a graph of my blog! Just for illustration.

‘ve been taking a look at my statistics for 2012. The numbers are interesting, but I’m not sure if they actually say anything that means anything in terms of how I should approach this blog.

On average, I tend to generate in the vicinity of 400 hits per day, totaling somewhere north of 10,000 looks each month. Once people show up, they typically stay long enough to read the content. But there are wild variations from day-to-day – it all seems to depend on the subject in play.

• My post on the recent “Chick-Fil-A Incident,” for example, doubled my count for the day it was published, and has since made its way to the top-five all time.
• The travel posts featuring Egypt, Jordan and Israel were huge.
• My recent comments about the new school year were widely distributed.
• Deeper, more devotional, content typically goes unnoticed.

Stock photo – they’re probably NOT reading my blog!

READERS: I appreciate my faithful cadre of daily readers – around 200, it appears – and another hundred or so of you check in a couple of times a week; but it takes a post of topical, tragic, or controversial subject-matter for the regulars to pass my blog on to their friends.

I know enough about keywords, Search Engine optimization (SEO), and the fickle vicissitudes of “public interest” to stack the odds in favor of higher numbers, but I don’t plan on going down that route because I’m not sure I see the point.

SO WHAT IS “THE POINT”? This blog is a window into how I am thinking about the title idea of Living the Life-Charged Life. I already know that such a subject matter is unlikely to attract a lot of random hits.

BUT… and this is really important… I am seriously motivated when it comes to inviting honest pilgrims (and seekers) to share in the devotional journey that the decision to think seriously about discipleship naturally becomes.

CHALLENGE: And so I’d like to challenge each one of you – those who regularly pause here and read my thoughts – to invite at least one other person to subscribe to this page (“follow”) so that you can possibly use these posts as a shared conversation about faith.

Let me throw out a few ideas. The Life-Charged Life could become the opportunity for an ongoing conversation, either with another believer or someone who is curious about faith.

• 

  Conversations about real life (Gator-Wesley Center)
  Schedule a get-together, once a week or so, to talk about anything challenging or interesting that came up in one of these posts.
• For convenience, consider conducting your conversation on-line – via email, Face-Time, or Skype.
• You could even use these posts as the content for a book club discussion, “Pondering over pints at the pub,” a church-school class, Saturday morning coffee, or a small-group.

Read in-depth about this concept in “10 Life-Charged Words”

NOT ABOUT THE HITS! Remember, I’m not trying to gather additional readers for the sake of better stats, so much as wanting to stimulate a nation-wide conversation aboutThe Life-Charged Life.

If you look around you, and listen in on the topics of interest so many people devote so much of their energy to, you’d have to agree that there’s room for a more deliberate, transformative, conversation about faith in our day-to-day lives.

- DEREK