September at Sacred & Secular: A Milestone and Something New

600 subscribers, 100 paid supporters, and a new five-day devotional

Rachel and I on a recent visit to the beautiful Bolton Abbey, in England. My wheelchair actually made it around the ruins just fine, even though Maisie the Pomeranian insisted that she came along for the ride!

Welcome to the September update from Sacred & Secular.

If you are new here, this is my monthly opportunity to pause for a moment, look back over the last few weeks, and share a little of what has been happening behind the scenes. This month, however, I want to begin with something rather lovely.

Sacred & Secular has reached 600 subscribers.

Even more remarkably, 100 of you are now paid subscribers, supporting my writing and making it possible for me to continue publishing these reflections so regularly.

When I began Sacred & Secular, I really had no idea what it might become. I hoped there might be some people who wanted to explore faith, Scripture and ordinary life in this slightly reflective corner of the internet, but watching a genuine community develop around the writing has been one of the unexpected joys of the past year.

So, whether you read every morning with a cup of coffee, catch up at the weekend, leave comments, send me emails or simply read quietly from wherever you happen to be in the world: thank you.

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Something new from Sacred & Secular

Over the past few weeks, I have also been working on something a bit different.

I have created a new five-day devotional called Finding God in the Ordinary.

It contains five reflections exploring wonder, questions, kindness, suffering, and the unfinished parts of life we do not yet understand. Each day also includes a short Scripture passage, a prayer and a question to ponder.

The idea is not to give you another thing to keep up with, but an offline version of what I provide here — something you can take away, use when you have a little more space, or return to whenever you need it. Just like here, it is designed to provide a little room each day to notice, question and consider where God might already be present in the life we are actually living.

And because reaching 100 paid subscribers feels like something worth celebrating, I wanted this first devotional to be a gift for all paid subscribers.

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As you are currently a free subscriber, I would love to invite you to join us.

Paid subscribers receive a new Sacred & Secular reflection every single day of the year, along with full archive access and occasional additional resources such as the new Finding God in the Ordinary devotional.

If Sacred & Secular has become part of your week and you would like to receive the daily reflections while supporting my writing, I would be delighted to welcome you.

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Looking ahead

September has been another month of following questions wherever they lead. Some reflections have taken us back into familiar Bible stories and asked whether they really say what we remember them saying. Others have wrestled with the more difficult parts of faith: uncertainty, suffering, forgiveness and what happens when easy answers are not enough.

I don’t sit down at the beginning of each month with thirty articles carefully mapped out. Usually, I notice something, read a passage differently, stumble across a question I cannot quite leave alone, or find myself thinking about an ordinary moment long after it has passed.

Then I start writing.

Somewhere along the way, you have started joining me in those questions, and the conversations that follow the articles have become just as important to me as the writing itself.

So as we move into October, please keep sending me your thoughts, questions and suggestions. If there is a Bible passage you have always wondered about, something about faith that has never made sense, or simply a subject you think would make an interesting reflection, I would genuinely love to hear it.

For now, though, I want to finish where I began.

600 subscribers. 100 paid supporters.

Those numbers represent real people around the world who have chosen to make Sacred & Secular part of their lives, and I never want to lose sight of that.

Thank you for reading, supporting, commenting, sharing and helping this little community continue to grow.

Here’s to October.