I have been blogging for a whole year now. My very first post was made on 28th March 2012. It was a very small post! In fact, it is so short that I’m going to quote it:
Thought I should put some sort of intro here. This is my blog on mental health and Christianity, I’m not sure how often I will update but I would like somewhere to put my thoughts. And also to have a WordPress account so I can comment on other blogs!
May you be blessed (I hope!) as you read, and please pray for me.
~Emma
It has been a good year. I feel quite happy with what I have written – although I have also discovered that I have no idea what makes a good post. Sometimes I write something I am very pleased with and…nothing. Other times I write something I think is slapdash, badly worded and loosely written, and people retweet it, comment on it, and so forth. So there you go, call me no-taste-Emma.
Of all the posts I have written the ones I like best are:
Those are both related to self harm – the Gerasene demoniac one represents all I could find about the passage from the internet, and a few books. I wasn’t able to access journal articles on the story, and I don’t have a huge collection of commentaries, but it is hard to find anything at all on it, so I was pleased with that one. Cutting and Marking in the Bible came about because I found some very interesting (to me) information in my Bible study program about that, so I passed it on.
Sometimes I write posts of hymns or poems. While I like all of them, my favourites are:
- Jesus of the Scars by Edward Shillitoe. As a self-harmer this is particularly poignant to me.
- I Ease You by George Herbert
- Within Our Darkest Night which is a Taize chant, a music video thereof is on the page
- Help Thou My Unbelief which is a prayer so like my own thoughts that I was amazed when I first read it!
The top five posts on my site in terms of hits are:
- 8 Ways You Can Help When Someone is Mentally Ill
- 4 Things Not To Say to a Depressed Christian
- Scrupulosity – Religious OCD (of which there will be more, I promise, as this has become so popular I have bought some books on the subject)
- 10 Things NOT To Say To Someone Who is Depressed
- My ESA Story (though, strangely, not the actual result – I won my appeal)
It seems that people like lists. I will have to include some more!
Top searches include “religious ocd” “scrupulosity” “self harm in teenagers” and variations on the theme of “what do I say to someone who is mentally ill?” and “how to tell if someone is mentally ill.”
Most of my visitors come from the UK, with some in America and others from around the world.
It has been good – I won Best Newcomer at the Christian New Media Awards 2012, which was most exciting, and my rate of hits is reasonable, I think, for such a niche blog.
Currently I get my ideas from things I read, other blogs, especially Emma Scrivener’s A New Name (check it out, very good!) I use Bible study resources from Logos (version 4, Scholar’s Library)
Attentive readers may have noticed that I have scaled back how often I post – I am a bit worried about running out of ideas or repeating myself. Now that I have passed the one year mark I think I can go over some of the ground I did last year, hopefully improving what I wrote. If anyone has any ideas for things they would like to see they would be welcomed!
Otherwise, thank you all for reading and, to repeat what I said at first, please pray for me, I always need it!
With love,
Emma
Believer's Brain 
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