I have a confession to make.  In 2014, I did something I had never done with my blog in the five years I’ve been writing it: I purposely did not check the stats for how many people were reading each post. 

You have no idea how freeing that was.  In the past, checking the stats wasn’t an option because of the platform I used to host the blog, and I found that it had a not-so-subconcious influence on what I chose to write about.

But in 2014, I just wrote whatever I wanted, and I discovered that my writing came to me with greater ease – probably because I was free to think about things like verb choice and word count, rather than caring whether people were as interested as I was in a particular topic.

Anyway, I finally checked the stats for the last year to do my annual recap of the top five most popular posts, and it was interesting to finally see if you enjoyed the stuff I most enjoyed writing.  Here are the top five:

1. My Friend’s Wife is Going to Jesus Today – Please Pray: I wish this weren’t one of the top posts.  In fact, I wish I never had to write it, because it was a necessary call to pray for my friend Kevin Harrison the day he had to make a decision no spouse wants to make.  Thanks to the thousands of you who took the time to pray for Kevin and Wanda after reading this post, and please take a moment to read Kevin’s follow-up post, Grieving Loss on Facebook.

2. The Holy Spirit Never “Convicts” Christians: Good grief, this post was a wonderful exercise in being misunderstood.  Nonetheless, it resonated with plenty of others, and at least it got people thinking about the way we describe the Holy Spirit.

3. How to Fall in Love with Your Spouse Again: This was one of those posts where the positive feedback meant so much.  It’s pretty encouraging to know that you’ve played a small part in helping a married couple like each other a little bit more.

4. “The Song” Struggles to Stay on Pitch: I have mixed feelings about this post, in which I was pretty hard on the faith-based film, The Song.  I’m still not a huge fan of the movie, but if I could write it all over again, I think I would have made more of an effort to highlight its strengths.

5. Using Facebook to Use People: I think Facebook can be a toxic tool for passive-aggressive behavior if we don’t watch ourselves when we’re using it.  Just writing this post helped me better recognize that in myself and keep an eye out for it.

To all of you who have been kind enough to read JoshuaRogers.com this year, thanks so much.  And if you’d like to check out some of my popular articles over at Boundless.org, click here to check out their five most popular feature articles and blog posts of 2014.

Finally, if you’d like to keep up with my latest posts, you can follow me on Facebook or Twitter. And if you’d like a weekly recap of what I’ve written, click here.

Happy new year!