I am reminded often that God’s faithfulness is new every morning, and God’s faithfulness is the subject of my inspiration today. I am going to start my meditation with the Euthyphro dilemma – a strange place to begin, maybe, but it sets the stage for some thoughts I have on faithfulness.
The Euthyphro dilemma poses a seeming conundrum: Is God good because He determines what is good as a matter of fiat, or is God good because goodness is objectively required of God just as it is required of us? In other words, does God arbitrarily establish what is good, or is God subject to what is good?
Of course, this is a false conundrum. It assumes there are only two possibilities: that God arbitrarily establishes what is good or that God is subject to what is good.
There is at least a third possibility—that good is determined by the very nature of God. Good is simply a description of who God is. Faithfulness is good because God is faithful, and the virtue of faithfulness is a reflection of God’s very character.
If we take the Bible for our revelation of God, His faithfulness always is, always was, and always will be. It’s not as if God actually trots out a new dose of faithfulness every morning. The saying is poeti:c that God’s faithfulness is new every morning. We experience God’s faithfulness anew every morning.
It dawns on me, though it shouldn’t come as any revelation, that God desires us to be like Him. As our Father, He is proud of and appreciates when His children emulate Him. Just like the child who is proud of her father and wants to be like him, pretends to be him in play because she loves him and honors him in her heart, we are grateful for God’s faithfulness, and we seek to be faithful like Him.
If God is faithful and His faithfulness is new to us every morning, as the psalmist says, then we should desire to be like Him in faithfulness in our own lives. We should desire to be like him in this way.
I am aware that the virtue of faithfulness isn’t the most exciting virtue we could adopt. Faithfulness, perhaps, doesn’t get the kind of attention that faith, hope, and love get, for instance. But where would we be without the faithfulness of God, who gives His word and keeps His promise? Whose yes is yes and no is no. Where would we be if His faithfulness was not new every morning? If we could not count on His grace? If we were uncertain that God would keep His promise to us?
As another year closes out, I look back on my journey of faith and thought that is captured in this blog. The blog doesn’t capture all of my journey. Some things remain private, and some things remain undeveloped and unpublished. Of the things I have put out into the sunlight of the blogosphere, though, I hope they have been helpful, encouraging, and challenging, if not interesting.
I usually launch right into the top ten articles (or so) of the year in review, but I want to take a moment to review where I have been and where I am going. The numbers tell a surprising story (to me), but I realize the numbers might be boring to you, so I will try to keep that part brief.
I expect that the substance of the journey may be more intriguing to the reader, but the substance is also more difficult to capture and to summarize. I will do my best.
By the Numbers
I started this blog in September of 2012 with 20 articles that garnered under 500 views. The top article on attributes of success had just over 100 views, 5 likes, and 3 comments. About 180 of the readers came through Facebook. Those early attempts at writing are somewhat embarrassing to me (so no links are provided).
I wrote over 100 articles each year from 2017 through 2021, with the high water mark being 149 articles in 2017. My writing has slowed in the number of articles I have written over the last 4 years as the words per article have increased (peaking at an average of 1908 words per article in 2025)
In 2025, I have published only 57 articles all year, but viewership for the blog is projected to top out around 110,000. That is nearly as many readers as the blog had from 2012 through 2021 combined.
The top article this year was viewed over 23 times more than all the articles published in 2012. In the fact, the top article in 2025 was viewed more times (11,790) than all the articles in any year prior to 2020 (11,016 in 2020).
The climb from 500 views to 110,000 views was not a sudden thing. Readership increased with jumps and plateaus through 2019, with a peak of just over 11,000 in 2018. In 2020, readership jumped over 20,000 views, which I attribute to the pandemic. People were limited in their activities. They stayed inside, and they read more. Perhaps, people were more contemplative because of the psycho-emotional impact of COVID.
I was excited about the increase in readership in 2020 and the increase again to 30,000+ in 2021 as the world began to emerge from the clutches of COVID. With the world getting back to “normal” in the following two years, readership settled around 30,000 views each year for several year.
Just last year, in 2024, the views skyrocketed over 61,000. The upward trajectory has continued in 2025 with projected views on pace to top 110,000.
The sudden increase in readership has taken me totally by surprise. I have not done anything differently than I was doing before, as far as I know. Perhaps, my writing is developing in ways that I do not realize. I do tackle more difficult subject matter and get into greater depth, but I would assume that might turn some people away.
I began writing out of a sense of obedience to God. I felt compelled to make use of the gifting He has given me. My main goal was to be faithful, and that focus continues to be a driving force.
I have tried to stay true to the theme of the blog, which is “navigating by faith.” I try to write out of my own experience, to write in keeping with my own thought and faith journey, and to write as I sense God is leading me.
My Faith Journey
In 2012, I was coming out of a long, slow regression in my faith. Perhaps, others might call what went through a deconstruction. That long, difficult segment of my like journey of my life set the stage.
I wandered for more than two decades in a spiritual malaise. My faith became stagnant. I stopped seeking. I stopped reading the Bible. I stopped praying with purpose. I eventually stopped going to church. I was shrinking back from God.
My priorities had shifted from a spiritual focus to career and providing for my family. The cares and concerns of the world overtook me as I pulled back from spiritual seeking and devotion to God. I moved with my family back to the area where I grew up, and I found myself attracted to and tempted by former ways of thinking and way of life.
As I look back, I can say that I had accumulated baggage that was holding me back and stifling my spiritual growth. I had accumulated theological structures that God needed to strip away. That “deconstruction” was long and painful as I languished in spiritual ruts for over 20 years.
I came to a point at which I had nothing to cling to but God and His mercy. I didn’t even know if He would “take me back” when I came face to face with the realization that the spiritual life within me was in danger of petering out completely, like a pilot light flickering in a cold windy place. I turned to God, and I said, “Where else will I go? Only you have the words of life.”
In that moment of surrender, God had mercy on me. With no illusions of grandeur that characterized my early Christian walk, I sought God and embraced faithfulness. Around that time, I began to sense that God wanted me to write. He didn’t overwhelm me, with it but it was persistent, like the nudging of a gentle wind.
I noticed, and I flirted with the idea for many months before I finally relented in my heart to do it. I set up an account in WordPress, and I began to write in September of 2012. The summary of the last 13 years tells the rest of the story.
“Two things I ask of you; deny them not to me before I die: Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me….”
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Proverbs 30:7-9
I read this short passage in Proverbs in my early years as a follower of Christ. It might have been in college after I gave my life and my heart to the Lordship and salvation of Jesus Christ, or it might have been in the few years that followed. I remember praying these things to God earnestly, and I have remembered these words and my prayer ever since.
During my late 20’s and through my 30’s, I struggled through many difficult years with a young and growing family. I didn’t realize how much this prayer would mean for me. At the age of 28, married for 3 years and with 2 children, I was restless. We had no debt, but we lived hand to mouth. I felt God leading me (I believed) to law school, but I was also focused on what I needed to do to increase my income so that we were not one bad circumstance away from the poorhouse.
I believe God did lead me to go to law school, but I also let worry, and sometimes even fear, creep in and sit at the threshold to my heart. Those three years of law school were very difficult. We had a third child at the end of my first year. The pressure of the work, of the necessity not to fail, of going into a hole financially, of an uncertain future and more was a very great burden. The pressures and the worry and fear overtook me.
I let those weeds grow up and choke the spiritual life in me. I didn’t maintain the discipline of regularly reading Scripture or daily prayer. My prayers were Hail Mary’s thrown up in the midst of the weariness and pressures of my life at that time. Even going to church was filled with tensions of herding three rambunctious boys into a car on Sunday mornings amid the whining, squabbling and desire simply to take a break. it became more of a duty that something I looked forward to.
Three more children, and new pressures and tensions as a new lawyer, struggling under the load of debt, and many, many activities threatened to snuff out the spiritual life in me. The worry, fear, busyness and lack of discipline on my part to take time out on a regular basis to sit before my God, listening for His voice, waiting on Him, being renewed by Him was a recipe for spiritual death.
In addition to praying the prayer of Proverbs 30:7-9, I prayed desperately to God before those days of tension, worry and fear not to let me slip ever from His hands. I didn’t pray that because I saw anything in my own heart that caused concern, but I had seen enough other people who seemed to have had it all spiritually together at one point walk (or slip) away into spiritual darkness.
It puzzled me then (in the joy of being a new Christian), and the inability to understand it at the time added to my concern that I might be no different than they. After all, everyone of us sins and falls short. There is nothing new under the sun. Though I had fully embraced Christ, and even left family and home and all that was familiar to me, to follow Him, Scripture gave me pause not to be so confident.
As I look back, I see that I was right to pray those prayers. Not that I count any advantage to being right. Rather, I have learned that Scripture is full of wisdom to which we would well to pay attention. Above all, though, God is faithful! Continue reading “Give Me Neither Poverty nor Riches”→
In the July/August issue of Christianity Today, the new President and CEO of the magazine, Timothy Dalrymple, talks of the “humble heroism of everyday faithfulness” in his From the President page. In a world of constant attractions and distractions, this simple word is timely. It’s always timely.
I am reminded of the book, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction Discipleship in an Instant Society, by Eugene H. Peterson. This book that came to my attention about 38 years ago when I was in college. A fellow Intervarsity member had just purchased the book to read. Her quiet, unassuming involvement in our group carried the weight and strength of authenticity, and the title of her purchase convicted me.
I felt impressed that I should read it. I had already become aware of my tendency to be controlled by those attractions and distractions that clamor for attention by reading the title of another book that caught my attention: Tyranny of the Urgent, by Charles Hummel, another Intervarsity connection.
These memories are clear to me. I was in my senior year of college, wondering expectantly what the future lay in store. I was busy with involvement in Intervarsity, finishing up an English Literature major and other commitments, complaining (maybe more like boasting) about being busy, desiring to follow and to be used by God.
God was talking to me in those days. I took notice. I had half an intention to read one or both books. I thought it might be a good idea. I felt like maybe God was saying something to me, but I probably won’t ever know exactly what God would have said to me if I had read them.
If I am being honest, I might have let my heart convince me there was no time for standing still, taking what seemed like a long way around to read books about simplifying my life and just humbly being faithful.
My desk at the office is cluttered with papers, magazines, notes, tokens of meaning and dozens of things that will catch not much more than my attention. My bedroom is cluttered with books and magazines I have read, books I have started reading, books I bought with the intention of reading – including books, no doubt, that never will read. Things have accumulated everywhere they lay waiting for some conviction of devoted simplicity to take hold on me.
I am still driven by the tyranny of the urgent, and a long obedience in the same direction is more the measurement of God’s faithfulness to me than any intention I have carried out in my own desire. I doubt I am unique in this, but that is not a great consolation.
I have an old friend who is “disgusted” that many Christians supported Donald Trump and were a significant factor in Trump winning the election. She, like many women (and men), cannot get past the infamous words that Trump spoke how about a woman reporter. I won’t repeat them here. They are too vulgar for polite company.
My friend has been so turned off of Christians and “the” Church by the fact that many Christians voted for Trump and were a factor in electing him, that she no longer goes to church at all after decades of being a church-goer.
I don’t want to get into politics here. That isn’t the issue I’m focused on.
I have family and friends who say that they can’t believe in God, or can’t believe in the Christian God, because Christians are hypocrites. This is what leads me to write this piece.
Navigating by Faith 