Dear readers...
It’s confession time.
We’ve been calling you names behind your back.
Before Faith Squared went live, we had several candid conversations about our number one fear: that we’d put our voices out there…and no one would give a damn.
We have Google analytics. We can tell in an instant how many people see each post, how many pages each visitor looks at, even the average length of time they stay on the site. So it’s not the number of people who visit Faith Squared that’s at the heart of the fear. It’s not knowing how those visitors are responding to what they’re reading.
It is all too easy to hit “publish” and then get caught up in waiting for feedback that may or may not come—comments, likes, shares, tweets, retweets, etc. The silence can be deafening, and the vigil exhausting.
We found out very quickly that our fear was not unique. Robin at Farewell, Stranger created a Manifesto for bloggers that is full of brilliance, including this: "Accept the days you get nothing but cyber-crickets."
All bloggers are afraid of crickets. Some, to the point of being so paralyzed by the potential silence that they are unable to post at all.
In order to manage our own cricket fears, the commitment we made, and to which we return again and again, is that we are writing for ourselves and for God, trusting that whoever needs to hear what we have to say, will. And that is all that matters…even if we never hear from them.
In short, we decided to embrace the crickets.
Then, we decided to name them. After all, Lady Gaga has her Little Monsters, Mickey has the Mouseketeers, Jerry has his kids, and Butch and Sundance have the Hole in the Wall Gang. Our readers deserve the same level of notoriety.
An overwhelming distaste for things that crawl, coupled with an overwhelming need to make up words, led to the execution of two birds with a single stone, so to speak. But wait…there’s a third bird! We also have an overwhelming love of acronyms, and EHQ—emphasis on the “Q”—is one of our favorites. So we dubbed our silent audience “Qrickets.”
Always ones to seek the spiritual/magical meaning of things, we consulted the Oracle Internet and found this:
“Crickets are the ones lost in darkness. Whenever the light goes out, they cry out for God and He answers them with the morning light.”
Perfect.
And, dear Qrickets, do you happen to know what a group of crickets is called?
An orchestra. Even more perfect.
So clearly, it was not simply our fear of crawly things and our love of made-up words and acronyms that inspired the name for you, our beloved readers. It was the maestro Himself.
Thanks for being here. Keep on chirping.
Love,
Michele & Alizabeth