You may have noticed that the New Song blog fell suddenly silent a week or more ago. I had just begun the Jesse Tree project, and I was tossing up additional posts, getting into the Advent season–and then nothing. The Holmes house hit a major bump when all the kids came down with this nasty cold/flu thing going around and flopped around on chairs and couches like they had just rolled off the rubber chicken factory line.
Actually, the major bump was when Matthew the seven-month-old filled his head with mucus, started coughing, and stopped sleeping. My wife and I took turns pacing with him through the night for the better part of a week; we did only the essentials during the day, and by the end we didn’t do those, either. We hit that point where you have to rearrange things on the kitchen counter creatively so you can put down your cup. Only you can’t find a cup, because all the sniffling, hacking rubber chickens take one sip from each cup in the cupboard, decide they need a new cup, and even drink from your cup when you’re not looking.
So the Jesse Tree project is dead for this year. But in all that night-time pacing I thought a lot about new ideas and directions for the blog. I actually compiled a spreadsheet one afternoon of all my top blog posts from the past couple of years and I ranked them by the number of “hits”. And I learned something extremely valuable from that exercise:
Which posts get lots of “hits” and which do not is pretty much random. It has nothing to do with how well written or thoughtful the blog post is. Seeing that fact in cold numbers really takes the ego out of blogging.
So I figure I should just keep writing about whatever I enjoy writing about, although I do have some crazy ideas about new directions that may or may not work out, depending on which way the wind blows. To this point in my life, when I have kept on doing things I enjoy then God has always opened neat doors in front of me.
