Twenty Years of Winging It

Last Saturday marked a special date for me. Of course, Saturday was News Weakly and Sunday was Father's Day, so I didn't get to this until today.

On Tuesday, June 20, 2006, I started this blog. Back then it was called Birds of the Air, because I had the bold, ambitious dream of writing about birds. Just birds. Nothing but birds. Ornithological purity.

And … well … that lasted about five minutes. Turns out you can only say so much about feathers before you start wandering into theology, culture, sarcasm, and whatever else crosses your mind while staring at a pigeon. So I changed the name to Winging It, which turned out to be far more accurate than I intended.

Twenty years later, here we are: 7,385 posts in 7,305 days. Yes, that’s more than one a day. No, I don’t know how it happened. I suspect sleep deprivation played a role. Or divine intervention. Or both. In that time, the blog has racked up almost 8 million views and more than a quarter of a million comments. I’m not a “super blogger” ... I’m more like the guy who accidentally wandered onto the stage and just kept talking until people started listening ... but I like to think I’m reaching every reader God intends me to … even the ones who got here by Googling something completely unrelated.

Speaking of which, here’s a fun mystery: on July 31, 2025, the blog had more than 1.8 million views. Why? I have no idea. Nothing special happened. I didn’t post a picture of a celebrity bird or solve world hunger. It just … happened.

My most‑viewed post ever is from October 11, 2006 ... part of a series called Hard Sayings, on “Sell all your possessions.” It has over 54,000 views. My second most‑viewed post is The History of the Choir from July 5, 2006, with more than 40,000 views. I don’t know who’s out there desperately searching for choir history, but apparently there are tens of thousands of them. My third‑place post limps in at around 14,000 views, clearly not trying hard enough.

What I do know is that I’ve probably gotten more out of writing this blog than anyone has gotten out of reading it. Teaching works the same way ... people say they enjoy it, but I’m the one walking away thinking, “Wow, I learned something today. I hope no one noticed.” Writing has traced my thinking, exposed my errors, reinforced better ideas, and trained me to walk through life wondering, “Should I write about that next?” It’s basically turned my brain into a 24/7 content generator, whether I like it or not.

And then there’s News Weakly. Somehow, those entries are consistently the most‑read posts each week. I’m not sure what that says about me, my readers, or society in general. Maybe I’m better at snark than I should be. I joke that “sarcasm is one of the services I provide,” but honestly, I wish it weren’t. It’s one of my many character flaws ... right up there with boldly suggesting "better ideas" to my wife or thinking I can fix things around the house without Googling it first.

So I keep writing. I keep trying to inform, teach, and explain ... sometimes successfully, sometimes accidentally, sometimes with more sarcasm than sanctification. And I’ll keep praying that God invests some of Himself into each and every reader, and that you’ll be blessed … one way or another.

Twenty years in, I’m grateful ... for the words, for the readers, for the strange statistics, for the accidental choir historians, and for the God who somehow uses all of it, even the snark.