Thanks International Readers

The number of people taking a look at the blog has gone down in recent weeks, a trend that corresponds with the Coronavirus. With more people at home under "shelter in place" orders, I guess that people are watching more movies or binge-watching TV shows.

That's happened here at our home too.

I'm trying to watch as many episodes of Father Brown before it leaves Netflix, presumably to migrate to BritBox, on March 31. I watch about one of those forty-six-minute episodes at night before I sanitize our kitchen, bathrooms, door handles, drawers, faucets, and other frequently handled items, then get ready for bed.

On a slower pace, I watch episodes of Cadfael starring Derek Jacobi and Walking Through History with Sir Anthony Robinson (Tony Robinson).

When not running to get groceries or other errands or tending to her ninety-year-old mother, my wife is currently bingeing on Call the Midwife.

Clearly, we're Anglophiles.

Our daughter isn't when it comes to movies or TV shows, but is in the realm of music. Her bingeing show of choice is Golden Girls.

But for all the likely sheltering-in-place happening around the world, the blog still sees readers log on from different parts (and some unknown parts) of the world. I love that!

This is where Google tells me the most recent 1000 visitors are from, as of 12:56 AM, Thursday morning, March 26.

So, hello, everyone!

Welcome to the blog and please come back often.

I'm from the United States and have been to Germany and Canada. I would love to visit the other countries listed here someday and perhaps, when Coronavirus is conquered, as it will be, probably sometime in 2021, meet some who come here often. (By the way, I've also been to England but not the rest of the United Kingdom, Denmark, and France. But people from those countries aren't known to be among the most recent one-thousand visitors.)

Wherever you live, God bless you and protect you and your families from this pandemic.

May you experience His love and support in these times.

And may all who have already suffered the loss of loved ones the world over take refuge in the compassionate, forgiving, life-giving God revealed in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.

Thanks for coming here, readers!

The GoogleAd and Amazon Adverts on this blog

Hi, everyone!

Traffic to this site is up about 500% from what it was this time last year. When I look at the numbers of folks who read the blog each day, I'm humbled and pray, "Please use it for Your glory, Lord." Not everything I post is about faith in Jesus Christ, of course. But I do hope the central message of new and everlasting life with God through faith in Jesus comes through as you visit.

But what's the deal with those Google and Amazon Affiliate advertisements that appear on the site?

I'm signed up with both companies. The two programs are not the same and I thought that I'd explain them both to you.

Google Ads appear here in the sidebar on the left and at the end of each post. I have almost no control over what ads Google decides to place on the site. (The one  exception is if I learn of an ad that appears in your feed, meaning you would have to let me know about it so that I could inform Google. You can also block individual ads that you may see on this site.) I only receive payments for the Google advertisements if you, as you're reading the blog, click on the ad. For every click, Google pays me between one- and two-cents. Since September 9, 2004, I've received a total of $689.70 in payments for the Google ads. (You can see that I'm well on my way to becoming a billionaire.)

The Amazon Affiliate program allows me to select from a variety of ad formats as well as ads for specific items that I recommend for purchase from Amazon. When a reader from my site clicks on an Amazon ad, it takes them to Amazon. If they remain on Amazon from that click and make purchases, I receive credits for future Amazon purchases myself. So far, Amazon has given me credits amounting to...drum roll, please: $0.00.

Just a little FYI.

Leave a comment already

I haven't had a counter showing me the number of page views of my blog from its beginning. But since that became a standard feature for blogger.com sites, it's been interesting to see the countries from which readers view it.

Below are two graphs. The first shows where recent hits have come from. The second shows the countries from which readers have logged on since the counter started.

The counter shows me nothing about who the readers are. You can remain anonymous.

But I'm curious about who stops here. So, when you read a post here, consider leaving a comment. I'd love to read what you have to say.

Still big in Russia?

Well, not big. This blog doesn't get the kind of traffic the blogging biggies draw.

But it's always interesting to me that so many of this blog's readers come from Russia.

Over the course of the blog's life, the overwhelming majority of page views are from the United States, as you'd expect. But there are some weeks when lots of Russians seem to visit and, as with this week, the largest bloc of visitors are Russians. I'm not sure why.

If there are any Russians who would like to explain, leave your comments below.

By the way, I can't tell anything personally or individually about the people who visit the blog, just the big metrics.

So, hello, Russia. Christ is Lord!

[If the image below is too small to see, click on it to enlarge.]

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Ann Althouse and "lightweight religion"

I happened to look at Ann Althouse's blog today, just because she usually posts things about newly-deceased musicians and Leonard Cohen passed away yesterday.

True to form, Althouse had embedded a video clip from a Leonard Cohen press conference, one held last month to promote the release of his last LP, You Want It Darker.

In the clip, Cohen explains how Biblical language and imagery was part of his "vocabulary" and that, while he tries to avoid being too obscure for general audiences, he leans on the Biblical landscape in his lyrics.

Cohen then goes on to explain that he's experienced "grace from elsewhere," but that there's no "structure" to his religious impulses and that there was certainly nothing along religious lines that he dared to share with anyone.

It sounded like mush, the kind of pablum, unoffensive and unexceptionable fluff, that some people try to palm off as thoughtful spirituality--along the lines of the oft-repeated refrain, "I'm spiritual, not religious," whatever that means. (Hint: It means nothing. People who say it may as well be talking like the adults in a Charlie Brown TV special.)

I laughed out loud when I saw one of the labels Althouse gave to the post with the Cohen embed: lightweight religion. Althouse demonstrated here that you can even use labels to say something. I was sure that this must be the only post in the Althouse archives that bore the label lightweight religion.

Actually, no. Althouse has applied the title to quite a few of her posts. They make for somewhat interesting light reading. I haven't looked to see if she's got a heavyweight religion label.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Gottlieb, Althouse, and Blogging

Over on Facebook, Annie Gottlieb recently became sentimental about the old days of blogging...all the way back in 2004:

Today I found myself nostalgic for the early days of blogging as if it was some leisurely, pastoral 19th-century...
Posted by Annie Gottlieb on Thursday, January 7, 2016

I was in the thick of blogging back then as well and remember it as a heady time when we thought that ordinary people--though Gottlieb is no ordinary person, she's a published author--could get our thoughts out into public view and engage in public dialog about issues that we thought were important or just engage in silliness that "the blogosphere" might find interesting.

And, as Gottlieb points out, in the days before Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and even the now nearly-forgotten MySpace, there were thousands of people writing blogs, commenting on blogs, and interacting with blogs in an interesting way. A recovering alcoholic told me that a piece I'd written had caused him to go to worship at a church for the first time in his life. An expert on German culture told me how insightfully I'd written on German ambivalence about a national ad campaign that encouraged patriotic pride. A political journalist complimented a piece I'd written on the 2008 presidential campaign. The New York Times linked to a piece I wrote on the gnostic gospel of James. In the process, I virtually "met" a lot of interesting people. Gottlieb, for one. But others as well. As I say, heady stuff.

As Gottlieb posted on Facebook, that was all short-lived. Social media came along and many of us in the blogosphere drifted to it. But few of the posts that appear on social media today--including cat videos--are as interesting as the thoughtful, interesting, passionate, or funny blogging being done in those days by people like Mark D. Roberts, Richard L. Cohen, Danny Miller, Charlie LeHardy, Alex M. Jordan, Tamar Jacobson, John Schroeder, and others.

Several bloggers have weathered the changes wrought by social media and the usurpation of the blogosphere by name brands. One who stands out to me, though I don't always agree with what she says, is Ann Althouse, law professor at the University of Wisconsin, who, by the way, met her husband through her blog, a guy who, when their face-to-face "courting" began, lived about five miles from where we were living in Clermont County, Ohio. In a comment on Gottlieb's Facebook post, I wrote:

...Ann Althouse seemed to "get" blogging from the beginning. She's...a quick study with a wonderful wit. She writes well. And she's thick-skinned. I still read her blog occasionally and clearly, she has a loyal readership.

When I say that Althouse "got" blogging (and did so in ways that others, including me, didn't), I mean that she seemed to see it as a kind of performance art, the perfect venue for her rapid and often unique observations of reality, the news, and politics. (Though her politics don't easily fall into red or blue categories.) She understood that the blogger could entertain and provoke, but with humor. The blog became an outlet for the kinds of observations two friends might make to each other about the latest headline, a piece of art, a place in a park or a coffee shop, or, and this is something that horrifies Althouse, a man wearing short pants.Althouse's blog is still enormously popular, her many daily posts eliciting lots of comments and dialog. Often, Althouse's posts are cultural or semiotic observations.

Gottlieb responded to my observation:

...you're right, Ann figured it out and is one of the survivors. (I met most if not all of my blogfriends in her comments section—you included, I think!)

Yes, me included. And interesting people like Gottlieb are part of why I still blog. I still hope to keep finding them and to interact and dialog with them in respectful, and more long-form, ways about the most important ideas and values in our lives.

The Death Blog

Given four posts recently mentioning the deceased, I'm wondering whether that shouldn't be the name of this blog.

Speaking of George Washington

Here's a collection of posts I've written about the first president over the years.

The Motorcycle of Youth?

I love the simple posts on the blog, Jungle Jot, presented by an "accidental missionary" in the Philippines. Here, an enticing bit about a seemingly magical motorcycle. Feel free to theorize on the source of the renewed beard.

What Happened to the Posts?

You may notice that two posts from yesterday were deleted. There's nothing wrong with your computer and Google isn't gobbling up posts. I just woke up this morning and thought, "I don't like what I wrote." So, I deleted the two posts, something that probably slightly improves the Internet.

Sometimes, you just have to flush the junk and move on.

Neither...Nor

I was writing something earlier today and wondered about the proper use of the words, neither and nor in the same sentence. Grammar Girl helped me out.

By the way, Oxford says that both the words, neither and either, can be pronounced with long e's or with long i's in their first syllables. So, neither you with your long e, nor I with my long i are grammatically incorrect. No need to call the whole blog off.

5 Surefire Ways to Get Blog Traffic

So you want people to visit and read your blog? Based on my ten-and-a-half years as a blogger, here are five surefire ways to get blog traffic.

• Be sure to write posts with titles like, 5 Surefire Ways to Get Blog Traffic. Create titles like people see on the covers of magazines. Everyone likes to think that any challenge in life can be overcome by a few steps. It's usually a lie, of course. Life, after all, is more complicated than that. But people like to think that it's not.
• Be sure to use bullet-points as your primary means of communication. People don't have much use for the consideration of unknown mysteries. So, even if you don't have any idea what you're talking about, use a bullet point and you'll seem like an expert.
• Tell people how they can monetize their blogs...and their lives. Show them how, by being market-driven, cultivating their brands, and following whatever the crowd says is important to them, they can make money. 
• If you're going to talk about politics, make sure that your every phrase has a sharp elbow and will make your readers cheer with malice. Nothing makes the readers of many political blogs happier than having their own points of view confirmed in ways that are vicious and condescending toward the opposition.
• Never discuss the most important issues of life. Never talk about the fact that all human beings are in need of the forgiveness of sin and freedom from death. Never talk about how desperately God loves all people, so desperately that He became human in Jesus of Nazareth, bore the death punishment for sin we all deserve, and then rose from the dead in order to give forgiveness of sin and new, everlasting lives to all who repent and believe in Jesus. It makes people uncomfortable when bloggers do that. It makes them think that maybe they aren't masters of their own destinies, after all.

I've violated these five methods throughout my blogging career and can proudly report that I average about 200 visits to my blog each day. According to Technorati, the blog is presently ranked 3838 worldwide and falling. Pretty impressive, huh?

I know exactly what you need to do to gain blog traffic...and I try never do it. (Most of the time, time, time.)   

May 28: Ninth Anniversary of This Blog

Tomorrow marks the ninth anniversary of this blog.

Frankly, I had no idea what a blog was when I started this one. I was just looking for a place to "park" my Sunday sermons and the columns I then wrote for a weekly Community Press newspaper in the Cincinnati area.

As you can see from perusing the archives on the right, it took some time for me to build up steam as a blogger. After a time though, it became a daily exercise and remained so for a few years. I believe that it sharpened my skills as a communicator, as the newspaper column had previously, and so I enjoyed the discipline of daily blogging.

What with changes that have come to my life in recent years, the blogging has become less frequent. But I still enjoy it a lot.

The blog has brought interesting people into my life, most of whom I've only "met" online. I have been able to actually meet several of my blogging colleagues though, back when I attended the first GodBlogCon at Biola University in California. That was a real treat!

But I truly have enjoyed corresponding with people from all over the world and count it a pleasure to have made your acquaintance in this way.

Though I have rarely advocated political positions here, I have, because of my interest in history and my past involvement with politics, sometimes written about politics and history. I seem to be doing a lot less of that these days. My focus is tighter as I take my cue from the apostle Paul, striving not to be distracted by the noisy and unimportant, and knowing nothing but the crucified Christ.

Besides, time and experience have shown me that I know a lot less about "everything" than I once thought I did. Preachers aren't pundits and that includes me. But of the God made known in Jesus Christ I am certain and I learn more about Him all the time; that's why I talk so much about Him here.

A few tidbits:

• The blog was originally called, Better Living, which was the Norman Vincent Peale-sounding name I had chosen some years before for the newspaper column I wrote beginning in 1998.
• The first post was a column I had written in September, 2011 regarding what to tell children about the terrorist attacks of that month.
• There have been a total of 5112 posts, many of them short "pointers," directing people to other places on the Internet. But there's been a lot of original writing here, some in embarrassingly great need of editing, ranging from grammatical correction through dramatic paring down, all the way to merciful deletion of entire posts. Despite the flaws, I've decided to leave it all here: the good, the bad, and the really ugly.
• I don't know for certain when I added SiteMeter to track visits to the blog, although I believe it was sometime in 2005. Since its installation, there have been a total of 724,443 visits to the blog, with 1,187,139 page views.
• Along the way, I've written a number of serials, most written especially for the blog and some being sermon series and sets of devotions used in the congregations I've served during these past nine years, Friendship Lutheran Church near Amelia, Ohio (I was there from 1990 to 2007) and Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio (where I've served since November 2007). My favorite sets of blog posts include the Happiness Project, 40 Days to Servanthood, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, the Promise and the Perils of Democracy, Opening Your Spiritual Gifts, and two sets of posts I did, one on how Christians might think about immigration reform and another on how they might think about the 2008 presidential elections. (In neither of these last two sets of posts did I advocate specific positions. I simply sought to give people Biblical prisms through which they might consider the issues at hand.) (By the way, you can use the search function at the top of this blog page to look for anything mentioned above that might interest you. You can also do separate Google or Yahoo searches.)
• There are several posts that seem to attract traffic every day. One was written six years ago, just before my wife and I celebrated our thirty-first wedding anniversary, about the lessons I'd learned regarding marriage. Another dealt with the phenomenon of tiny houses. And another is one which I think simply attracts the traffic of those looking for photographs relative to the Holocaust and Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I hope that you've enjoyed your visits here. 

I also pray that God uses this blog not just to present Christ to readers, but also, I hope, to demonstrate that if God can love and redeem and use an imperfect, sinful person like me, God can love and redeem and use anyone!

Please Keep Praying for Pastor David Wayne

Here is an update from David Wayne. Please continue to pray for him.

David's musings about his motives for blogging, whether to glorify God or bring attention to himself, are something with which I identify. It reminded me of this song, I Just Wanna Know, in which Steve Taylor wrestled with his own motivations for being a musician, back in 1985.



Life's too short for small talk
So don't be talking trivia now
Excess baggage fills this plane
There's more than we should ever allow

There's engines stalling and good men falling
But I ain't crawling away

I just wanna know
Am I pulling people closer?
I just wanna be pulling them to you
I just wanna stay angry at the evil
I just wanna be hungry for the true

Folks play follow the leader
But who's the leader gonna obey?
Will his head get big when the toes get tapping?
I just wanna know are they catching what I say?

I'm a little too young to introspect
And I surely haven't paid all my dues
But there's bear traps lying in those woods
Most of them already been used

I just wanna know
Am I pulling people closer?
I just wanna be pulling them to you
I just wanna stay angry at the evil
I just wanna be hungry for the true

Search me, Father, and know my heart
Try me and know my mind
And if there be any wicked way in me
Pull me to the rock that is higher than I

I just wanna know
Am I pulling people closer?
I just wanna be pulling them to you
I just wanna stay angry at the evil
I just wanna be hungry for the true

[There are other Steve Taylor songs on the playlist linked above.]

About Those Google Ads

Readers of Better Living will notice that Google ads appear both near the top and at the bottom of each page to which you go here.

Some of the ads promote what I consider fairly "fringie" expressions of Christianity--speculators about the times and particulars of the apocalypse (something Jesus says we have no business doing), pseudo-theologians offering their own unbiblical theories on how Jesus saves us from sin and death, and so on.

I just wanted you to know that I have nothing to do with the advertisers that appear here and their appearance on this blog doesn't denote endorsement.

The ads appear as a result of my participation in the Google AdSense program. Through it, bloggers "earn" a few cents every time readers click on an advertiser's link appearing on their page. So far, as of November last year, after six years of blogging, I'd received $105.78 for the ad traffic generated from this blog. And I don't expect any more income to be generated here until about 2033. (Google only cuts checks once the clicking adds up to $100.)

Admittedly, this is the poor side of the Internet. That's OK.

But remember that just because someone's ad appears here doesn't mean I endorse what they're promoting.

For Short Takes...

go to my Twitter account.

More Thoughts on Post 4000

I only realized what was in the offing a few days ago, but last night, this blog reached something of a milestone: the 4000th posted item. It happened with the posting of a sermon I preached last night called, What Servants Do.

Now, for bloggers who are better writers and quicker studies than I am and who post frequently during the course of a day, that number isn't such a big deal. And while I do post simple pieces pointing readers to other things on the web, the lion's share of those 4000 posts have been columns, essays (on a whole lot of different topics from history and politics to art, sports, and music), sermons, or Bible studies. (If Glen Reynolds, Ann Althouse, or Andrew Sullivan are the Albert Einsteins of the blogging world, I'm probably best described as its Forrest Gump.)

Some of my posts have been re-runs, too, and others are reworkings of old posts. But there's a lot of original stuff.

Of the 4000 pieces that have appeared, there are some I don't like very much these days and others of which I think, "Not bad."

But all this blogging--I posted the first piece on May 26, 2002----has been a labor of love.

I blog for several reasons, but mostly: (1) Because I love to write; (2) Because I want to convey to the stray reader who may run across my blog that while Christians have beliefs, that doesn't make them closed-minded, bigoted, or bound by a particular political ideology.

In the mix, I hope to convince people that as one considers life and looks for explanations, the most intellectually honest and defensible is faith in the God revealed fully in Jesus Christ. My former religious stance, atheism, certainly doesn't hold up to intellectual scrutiny. And while there are plenty of reasons to dismiss Christians, I know of none for dismissing Jesus, the Christ. In my experience, I have found him to be in fact just who he claims to be: the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the way to the Father Who made us, Who loves us. We see God most clearly in the cross experiences Christ shares with us, the place where Christ meets us and transforms us into partners in his new creation. This new creation is the kingdom in which Christ answers our deepest yearnings for love, for justice, for peace, and for meaning.

I mentioned politics earlier, I find myself thinking about it a lot less these days. Part of that no doubt is that it's gotten fairly crowded out of my life. There's a lot going on in the parish I serve as pastor, for one thing. For another, on my days off this winter, I've been taking a class at a nearby branch campus of Ohio University. Between my sixty-plus hour work weeks and keeping up with the reading, there hasn't been much time to consider politics.

Even when I do find time for political blogging in the future, you can be sure that I won't be expressing opinions about who to vote for or to engage in the mindless kabuki dance of right/left argumentation that renders most of our political debates laughably irrelevant.

I like to take a longer-term view, which may explain why at this time, the blog averages just under 300 hits a day, small by blogging standards, but enough to afford rich and enjoyable interaction with readers.

Anyway, I want to thank everyone who has ever read, linked to, written about, or commented on the blog. Thanks.

God bless.

Mark

Lately...

I've been enjoying this blog.

Oh, Canada!

I just checked the traffic for this blog and discovered that three-fourths of the people reading it at this very moment are in Canada.

Wonder what that's about, ay?

No matter. Welcome!

If you read 'Better Living' once a week or more...

...I'd appreciate you letting all the people on your email lists know about the site.

I write 'Better Living' with the goal of sharing Christ in accessible ways with all sorts of people, Christian and non-Christian, leaving every kind of reader to decide for themselves what they make of Jesus and His claims to be both God and man.

On top of that, not taking positions on political issues on which I don't see God speaking clearly in the Bible, I try to cast a fair eye on the politics and trends of the day, drawing strongly on my lifelong study of history and my past life as a political activist.

Occasionally, you'll find other things that might interest you or your friend here, if not in the currently posted items, then maybe in the 3900+ pieces posted here since I started 'Better Living' back in 2003.

Please do send a link to Better Living to all your email friends...and keep coming back.

Thanks and God bless!

Mark