2011 and this little blog

One of the blog I follow is a Japanese News blog. This week they've featured their most read blogs of the year, so I thought I'd go and have a look at my little blog. 

No surprise really, the day that the most readers came this way and read this blog was March 15, four days after the giant earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan. Here's a link to the post on that day.

Not really much to do with my "brilliant" writing, more related to the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster news. Oh well. 

This is the graph of page loads from the 6th of March for about a month.

Actually it is a bit depressing. Because other than this scary crisis, the other big page-load day occurred in January when I had an emotional blowout in a relational conflict. Something I don't want to dwell on at all.

Is it really that people are attracted to bad news? Well, yes, it would seem. Japan isn't on most people's radar and mission isn't either, so my blog isn't all that popular – except that Japan was very much in the news back then. Certainly my family in Australia had enquiries about our wellbeing from people who almost never contact them at all (read distant relatives, for example). But it has had the effect (at least short term) of getting more people praying for Japan. Some people found this blog as a result of that tragedy and have continued to follow along (no idea how many).

But this whole blog isn't really about numbers. Though lots of readers would bolster my self-esteem and probably fuel my pride . . . It is more about telling the ordinariness of my story and helping those who do come this way to see that missionaries, while seeming to do something extraordinary, are really quite ordinary people. It has also had the side effect for me of the discipline of writing something every day (or almost), whether I feel like it or not, whether something dramatic has happened or not. That practise has to have be good for me as a writer. (And this is the 367th post this year. 998th post since I started back in March 2009.)

I've had some interesting, somewhat unexpected things come about as a result of this blog. 

One is as a result of speaking somewhat frankly about the challenges of parenting my not-quite-ordinary kids, I've ended up meeting regularly with a group of ladies who also have at least one challenging child. The honest sharing that has gone on in that group of ladies has been refreshing and encouraging.

We have gained new supporters via this blog (and Facebook connections). New people who pray for us, receive our newsletters, and want to help out.

I've also managed to recruit a new design editor for Japan Harvest. Not that I directly set out to do that with this blog, but things progressed in such a way that she found out what I do through this blog and we had a conversation one day that led us down the path towards me recruiting her. The story is here.

I've had some great "real" and "virtual" conversations with people as a result of what I've written here. I've also found out good information. At least two magazine articles have been written and published from things that started out as "just another blog post". In November one of my posts was featured on another blog (Women of the Harvest Writers Blog) and writers were encouraged to "do a Wendy"!

I'm sure other things have happened as a result of this blog that I'm forgetting or not even aware of. Maybe you know of them and can tell me. One that encouraged me this week was a post by Karen here where she writes about this blog being a part of the journey towards a greater involvement in mission.

I'm looking forward to see what happens with this little blog in 2012.