I would, of course, love to have you buy books through my Amazon store because I like the books and I get a little from it. But when people talk about increasing traffic so that you will buy more services, I have no services to offer.

I mean, I could offer a weekly enewsletter for a small price, but the idea is scary: “Subscribe to my newsletter and for $4.95 a month, get better faith. Get more out of your prayer life.”

I’ve got nothing.

Now, to be excruciatingly honest, I love traffic. I love when one month is bigger than another, when something clicks.

But what I want to be true of me is that I am passionately concerned with helping people understand God better than they do before reading. And what I want to be true of you is that you begin to develop that same passion.

So I show up. And write. Because I often can only help you understand better when I am allowing my own heart to be examined, to be explored.  But I am troubled that I am not helping you learn how to take next steps: “So, someone asks you about Jesus and why you talk about him, what do you say?”

Paul wrote to his mentee Timothy and said, “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.”

And then, later in his life, in a more vulnerable time, Paul said, “You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance,  persecutions, sufferings…”

The life Paul showed Timothy, he challenged Timothy to show others. But that takes shared life somehow.

So how can we do that?

(By the way. I’ve wondered about 140church.com but can’t figure out quite how to build community.)