Semi-Random Musings (28)

Somewhere back in December — wait, I should be able to do better than that.

December 11, 2013 was our first post ever. So this post, published on December 10, 2022, marked the completion of our ninth full year of daily publication, though I didn’t notice at the time. Today’s post means we’ve published across eleven different calendar years, for whatever that’s worth. So we thank the Lord for unanticipated longevity and for the endless wonders of the word of God and the person of Christ. We have yet to beg anyone for subject matter.

Let’s just say that in 2013 I didn’t really expect we would still be writing blog posts in 2023. I didn’t expect not to either. In 2013, that sort of thing was just too far away and too unreal to spend time thinking about.

Saying Goodbye to 2020 (and my Career as a Prophet)

Last year around this time I decided to test whether I have the gift of prophecy, so instead of making the usual New Year’s resolutions, I reeled off a number of what I thought were really obvious predictions for the then-upcoming year, the vast majority of which have been (or will shortly be) proven correct.

As I write these words, my prophetic pitch with respect to the U.S. election is still hanging in the air over the plate, and January looks to be a very interesting month. As to my other four predictions, in all honesty I can hardly claim much prophetic acumen: it turns out I was shooting fish in a barrel.

Top 10 Posts of 2019

I did this last year, and if it was not necessarily a smashing success, at least it was easy and fun. So why not give it another shot?

If we started any trends in our sixth full year of daily posting, it was probably due to the shortage of new material from Immanuel Can. IC has written a bunch of things in the past twelve months, many of which I’ve read and enjoyed. However, most of them have been directed to individuals online and targeted toward very specific personal needs, which made them poor blog fodder. Our loss.

In any case, what happened as a result is that five of our ten most-read posts this year (numbers four through eight) were various installments of my weekly email exchanges with IC. Hey, apparently our readership will take what it can get ...

Five Easy Predictions for 2020

I am not Daniel or Ezekiel. I’m not even George Orwell. So if we’re still here in January 2021, you can either say, “Well, he totally botched that,” or “Not too bad.” More likely it’ll be somewhere in between, as it usually is. Age and experience give one a certain ability to estimate what might be coming our way in our societies and churches. Basically, it is usually something like whatever happened the last time we saw similar symptoms.

But the operative word here is “might”. There are always factors for which we cannot account, the finger of God being far from the least of these.

So with it very much in mind that the Lord will do what he will in our world, let’s speculate about what we might see more of in 2020.

Top 10 Posts of 2018

Lots of things happened in 2018. Billy Graham went to be with the Lord. April and May were record high-traffic months for the blog, as you can see from the number of posts they placed in our annual Top 10. Our readers continued to show interest in how the church ought to deal with people who claim to be Christians but live sexually immoral lives, in the limitations of platform ministry and in the ongoing effects of sins that can’t be undone.

To top it off, Canada’s most infamous public intellectual popped up in four of our ten most-read posts, where he was both praised and critiqued, just as he was in much of the secular media in 2018.

The Dreaded New Year’s Day Post

Oh no. Not New Year’s Day again. Did I mention I hate writing “event” posts?

Yeah, I did. Well, here we are again anyway. It’s January 1 in a new calendar year, and many among our fellow Christians are doing the same sort of reassessment almost everybody tends to do this time of year. Those who aren’t are probably feeling better about themselves than you and me, but we’ll salvage a bit of delusional cred, at least in our own heads, by marking them down a notch or two for egregious lack of self-awareness.

Hey, this “taking stock” stuff needs to be done sometime, right? If there’s a better time to do it, I can’t think when it might be.

No Passage Back

Frozen New Year’s Day morning and I’m on my way to work with a line from an old Eagles song running through my head:

“I had to find the passage back to the place I was before …”

Except there is no passage back to the place we were before, is there.

Time is unidirectional and it seems to move faster as we age. The speed is probably a conceit of advancing years, but it certainly feels like a truism.

No Passage Back

A more current version of this post may be found here.