Year in Review - 2015

So 2015 is coming to an end. Often a good time to review and reflect.

First, the blog. According to the statistics, in the approximately 3,480 days I've been doing this, I've posted 3566 articles and had 407,000 pages read since they started counting in 2010. As for what people are reading, still at the top of the list ... Hard Sayings - "Sell all your possessions". Including 142 comments. You can guess why, I'm sure. It would be a difficult one that any sincere Christian might want to research and a good "gotcha" for any skeptic to use. Oddly enough, The History of the Choir is still at #2 of all time. I have no idea why. There can't be that many students of choirs. Of interest of late is Gender Complementarity. Since our culture no longer believes in that, I guess that might be of interest to some.

I also find it odd to find my source of audience. Oh, well, of course, the primary source is no surprise. That would be the United States. But coming in at #2 is Russia, and that is over twice the #3, Ukraine. Seriously? The former Soviet Union is my second best source of readers? Very strange. It's actually kind of cool.

Readership is down of late. I don't take it personally. Part of it, I suppose, is that I don't allow the singularly most controversial voice to comment anymore. His mere presence artificially inflated the numbers. But more to the point, I think, is the fact that I've said most of it before and, anyway, people lose interest after awhile. It's the nature of the human being.

But what about the year? Well, we've seen a "gun violence epidemic" which is defined as "the news media showing every possible gun violence they can find, at least when it fits their paradigm". (Statistically, gun violence in America has been dropping since its peak in the mid-1990's, but let's not bother with statistics, right? We know what is true; the media tells us so.) We have a refugee crisis. It's a crisis because on one hand several very bad groups are making a mess of things and on the other hand some of those very bad groups may be hiding among the refugees waiting to infiltrate. What's a body to do? We have demonstrated our national insanity this year by both eliminating marriage as a viable entity in favor of something that is not marriage (not even those who favor the redefinition of marriage to include people of the same gender deny that this is a redefinition) and then embracing as "heroic" the absolute lunacy of "gender confusion" (simple science will tell you what gender these people are). We have the whole "black lives matter" thing going on where, although it is awful that some police officers act in a racist manner, it has become a sham because the only black lives that matter to this movement are the ones they choose. None of them, for instance, are campaigning against the vast numbers of black children murdered in the womb -- far more than any other race. I don't see any marches attempting to stem the black-on-black murders that predominate murders in the black community. Those lives don't matter. Just the ones that do. Oh, and there's the whole exploration of Mars and Pluto going on which, on one hand, sounds really important and, on the other, seems really ludicrous. I mean, do we really need to know if there was water on Mars when we can't figure out how to stop ISIS or figure out what to do about those refugees, for instance? To me, Pluto pales in comparison.

So as 2015 slips off the last page of the calendar and we turn over to a new year, I find, once again, the absolute need to trust in a Sovereign God. Because, frankly, I'm pretty sure Obama, Putin, Hillary, or Trump will be unlikely to produce answers to the real problems we face. But God does. Starting with the Gospel. I should tell someone about that.