This past week, I had the honor of having an article published on The Gospel Coalition (“Teach Children to Value Singleness”). I was overwhelmed by the amount of love and support I received from people I know and people I don’t know. I heard from single men and women that they were encouraged to know they aren’t alone, and I heard from many parents about how they can use it in their parenting.

This was my prayer from the beginning when I first jotted down scraps of thoughts that later turned into this article – that God would use it to deepen our understanding of singleness and honoring him with our lives, no matter our relationship status.

Toward that aim, I look to next steps of pursuing a publisher for the manuscript I’ve written about singleness. And that’s where your continued support would mean so much to me.

I hate the thought of promoting myself merely to get a large number of followers. In the end, I don’t care if a post of mine gets five reads or five hundred so long as it can encourage one other person. I’ve had to learn that in writing this blog for the past thirteen years, learning to accept both obscurity and more widespread recognition.

But the reality is that publishers do look at numbers and they want to know there will be a market to which they can sell the book – so it’s important to have a following both on social media and my blog.

If you have enjoyed reading my writing and would like to read more in the future, you can subscribe directly to my blog by email (there’s a subscribe box on the sidebar or at the bottom of this post, depending which device you’re using to read it). That’s the easiest way to make sure you don’t miss a post and it can stay in your inbox until you have the time to read it.

If you are active on social media, I invite you to follow my “writer self” on Facebook and Instagram. I haven’t been the most active on those sites in the past year, but I plan to share more – both links to blog posts (that you can easily share with friends) as well as quotes, reflections on life, and progress on the book journey.

I love connecting with a wider audience of people who share the same goals and values, but I also prefer to keep personal accounts to people I’ve met in real life – and thankfully this method of social media allows me to do both.

Whether you’ve been reading my blog for a long time or you just discovered it, I’m beyond grateful for your support of these words that are God’s gift to me. Thank you for sharing in this journey of faith in both the hard things and the beautiful things. I’m excited to see where the journey leads next!

Photo by Courtney Hedger on Unsplash.