Reflections on 45 days of Continuous Blogging

I've spent over a month posting literally every day here at Bring the Books, and often two or three times a day. At first, this started by accident because I was doing the series on Craig Koester's Revelation commentary, but after awhile, I felt like I was being sharpened by writing here every single day. About two weeks into it, I decided to make it a challenge to myself to write every day, and to see if I could write quality stuff each time.

Looking over the last month and a half, I'm quite happy with what I see, but I can sense the end of my "personal challenge" drawing near. Our readership has grown by almost 40% in the last two months; we are now drawing between 2000-3000 visitors a month (RSS feeds make it hard to know for sure), which is really unexpected and incredible. It's an exciting feeling to sense that you may be really contributing something to the Reformed online community, and at the same time knowing that I am able to keep myself sharpened in the faith while doing it is very rewarding. Fighting for constant forward momentum is one of those disciplines that I've developed by pushing myself in this way here at BTB.

So why am I writing this introspective pause? Mainly because I need to take the pressure off which I've now put on myself. Blogging every day only takes a few minutes if you're a good, quick writer. But my biggest challenge is that I don't want to write if it doesn't come passionately from my heart, and so I need to just make a promise to our readers. (I seriously have no idea how Tim Challies does it.)

I promise never to write something which I don't feel deep in my bones, and not to write simply for the sake of taking up space or fulfilling obligation. Josh and I started Bring the Books because we believed we had unique voices to share in the Reformed community. Now, whether that is true or not is inconsequential, but the point is, we write because we love to write. And we write specifically for the Reformed community because we love Jesus Christ and His Church, and we want to see the church built up. The presence of orthodox, Reformed, culturally aware, plugged in fellow Calvinists should be edifying, and that's what we hope comes out of BTB.

I'm in the middle of reading a lot of great biographies, works of theology, and I was thinking of reading some more Sherlock Holmes short stories. In order to do that, I just need to turn the pressure valve and tell myself that it's okay if I don't post here literally every single day. In the long run, it's much healthier for the quality of the posts and the overall integrity of the site.