1K shares: My First Viral Post #sayyes

I’m here getting over what has been a very bad cold (complete with all the fixin’s — headaches, chills, coughing, copious amounts of thick snot, lots of blood tinged green and yellow phlegm and mucousy pink eye to top it all off), but I’m not the only thing that has caught a virus.

As a blogger, you periodically check your blog’s stats and analytics to see who’s reading and where are they reading from and how many people are reading and what post(s) seem to garner the most attention.

This week, I was reminiscing on that time when JEANNIE MAI MENTIONED ME ON HER SHOW (AAAHHHH!) and the concomitant blog post I wrote in response.  I scrolled down to the end of that post to see — out of pure curiosity — how many times that post had been shared. I saw the number but it didn’t quite register.  I had to blink a few times just to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me.

978 shares.  On Facebook alone.

What the…?

How?

Why?

What…. happened?!!!!!

You know what happened?  I’ll tell you what happened.  Apparently, my girl Jeannie Mai read that post too and SHARED IT ON HER FACEBOOK PAGE. *faints*

God, what is you doin’?!!!

At the time of writing, the aforementioned post has hit the 1K mark.  Yes, that’s right — it’s been shared 1000 times on Facebook, with a little over 2000 views.

(I’d just like to add that in terms of a views to shares ratio, that ratio (1:2) is phenomenal.  It means that for every 2 people who read the post, one person shared it.  In other words, half of those who viewed it, shared it.  In social media land, usually only small fraction of those who view sometime actually share it (like 1/7 or 1/10)).

Like, what is my life right now?  How is this my life?

Since I started this blog in 2015, there’s always been at least one post each year that’s been shared widely (but this is the first one that has been shared over one thousand times).  In 2015 it was my post about “Why I Love Being a Seventh-day Adventist (Despite a Very Disappointing Vote on Women’s Ordination)”.  In 2016, it was my interview with Jonathan in “Growing Up a Gay Adventist” and my commentary on the (White) Christian church in “Where is My Church When it Hurts?: On White Silence, Silence in General, Using Eschatology as an Excuse for Apathy and Inactivity and…Hope.” And yet as we near the end of 2017, not yet having really written anything to hit the ball out of the park (except maybe my piece on “Why I Don’t Go to Church”), I had begun to wonder, “What will it be this year Lord?”  I was content to close out this year with no grand finale.  I just like writing and I just want to blog, whether people read or not.

As a blogger, you never know which post it will be.  Like a cold, you never know where and when it’ll come.  So you just keep writing and then, “BAM!” out of nowhere you get hit upside the head with a viral post.  These things are unpredictable.  Sometimes I will write something thinking to myself, “Yo guy… this post is gonna be fiyah!!!!!!  This is so lit!!!!!!!” and then I’ll come back a day later and see that it’s only received eleven views.  And then there are other times when I write something seemingly innocuous, like that first Jeannie Mai piece, and I think that’s it’s heartfelt but not groundbreaking and it’s nothing special, and I’ll come back the next day and it’ll only have been shared like 10 times on LinkedIn, and then I’m like, “Wow… I stayed up writing this for nothing?!” and then two days later it’s mentioned on a nationally-syndicated talk show by a celebrity who was creeping my blog, and then a week later she posts another one of my posts on her Facebook page with her half a million followers.  You just never know.

So, looks like God is sending me another sign.  And it’s so weird because I literally started this blog the day before my Quebec bar exam — at a time I should have been studying and an exam that I ultimately failed, but, in retrospect (and after much tears and fighting and struggling and wrestling with and cussing out Jesus prayer) I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Looks like God may have a (somewhat nebulous, murky, and still opaque) plan after all.

So to celebrate, I am eating French fries with steak and I am singing along with the forgotten child of Destiny, Michelle Williams (speaking of destiny, lol).  When Jesus says yes, nobody can say no.  I’m a living witness: