An Encouraging Inquiry

If you aren't aware, Blogger provides lots of really great statistics for their bloggers. Of course there is never any personal information shown to me or anyone else. What I can see is number of page views, where those views come from (what country, browser, referring URL, etc.), and which posts have been more popular than others. I don't look at those stats very often, because that has never been the purpose of this daily blog. But, every so often I look at it, just 'cause I'm curious to see where people are coming from.

One interesting stat is "Search Keywords." I don't know exactly what this is, but it seems to be a list of the internet searches that lead to my blog posts. I've looked at this before, but there was one particular search that came up this week that caught my eye:

"what can the united states be grateful for"

According to the stats, this search generated two page views. I don't know who made that search or why, but that's not my business. In the end this gives me the idea that what I'm writing here every day is making a small difference. I imagined someone asking that question and literally searching for an answer to see what comes up, and they read something that I wrote here. This encourages me. This is my hope and dream: to be assured that the world is a little better because of what I could do and be.

By the way, if I were asked that question in person, I would say something like this: "I think the United States has more to be grateful for than anyone realizes, or believes. [name a few general things like social progress, certain freedoms, prosperity, life, liberty, etc.] It surprises even me whenever I stop to seriously think about it." :)