Around October 2009 this blog launched. After a few fits and starts, including a period where I didn’t post for several months, it seems to be flowing a on a regular pace. I still enjoy, readin’, writin’, and ruminatin’ so the blog continues.
Earlier this year, I announced a repurposing of Kingdom in the Midst.
Today, depending on who is doing the talking, the emphasis may be on grace, or it may be on truth. It is infrequently both. Sometimes one is leveraged against the other: “Well, we can show them grace, but we gotta tell’em the truth, too!” Similarly, “speak the truth in love,” leans heavily on the “speak the truth” part as if we should not love people just the same. “Speak” morphs crudely into “yell” more often than need be, and no one likes to be yelled at. When we show grace and truth, however, we display Jesus.
In fact, if you want to see what grace and truth look like together, read the Gospels. Jesus is the literal embodiment of them.
If this blog has a purpose to serve in the future it will (hopefully) be to bring grace, love, and truth into the important conversations of our time.
To this point that purpose has largely been met.
And, you, dear reader…
This brings me to my two requests. If you have not done so, would you sign up for email alerts for new posts? The box is at the top of the right sidebar. You get no more than one email a day, at 9:00ET, and only when new material has been posted. You do not get an email for every post. Your email address will never be sold no matter how many Nigerian princes offer money for it.
Why? Because the email list indicates interest in the blog, which translates into interest from advertisers.
But speaking of advertisers…
You may have noticed the “Advertise Here” box for Beacon ads. Let me put it this way: I do not know where advertisers spend their money, but they do not buy ads on this blog. Perhaps some will eventually, but ad sales are a very slow road.
So, I’ve created the option to make “buy” Kingdom in the Midst for a nominal fee.
nominal– (adj.) (of a price or amount of money) very small; far below the real value or cost
To be clear, Kingdom in the Midst is free to read and share. I’m not WSJ or NYT. A paywall would most likely be a death knell. But, far be it from me to hinder readers who might want to show their appreciation for this blog by giving a few dollars in support. Hence the PayPal “Pay Now” button in the sidebar.
Running a regularly published blog of freshly written content takes an immense amount of time. There’s one on the research staff, one writer, one copy editor, one content editor, one writer, and one publisher. That equals not six, but one: me. Any given story can take hours to research, read, cross check, fact check, write, rewrite, edit, rewrite, copy edit, find an image, make sure it is legit, adjust the size, etc. Then after publishing an article, correcting the rest of the misspelled, extra or doubled words. ;^)
Then there are actual costs: hosting company fees, domain fees, site security fees, and the like. These are not exorbitant, but they roll around annually. And, to date, all my government grants have been denied. (It’s Obama’s fault.)
If you enjoy reading, have been blessed or encouraged, learned something, or just stop by to see what you can disagree with on a given day, please consider giving $2, $5 or $10 periodically, starting today. You do not need a PayPal account to use the service, and the full transaction is PCI compliant. I neither see nor get any of your personal information.
Whether you sign up for emails or not, whether you “buy” Kingdom in the Midst or not, thank you for reading and sharing and please continue to do so. You are part of the more than 350,000 people from 150 countries and territories who have stopped by Kingdom in the Midst so far in 2015, and I am both humbled and grateful.
