Journey to Surrender

This is the second of two posts reflecting on the past year.

Rather than simply listing my top posts by the Google Analytics page-hit stats, I decided to take a slightly different tact and group the almost 40,000 page views I had over the year into a “hot topics” list for 2011.

The five topics are arranged by total page views around a given theme, with the most popular topics listed first. 

Here we go:


The popularity of these posts points to the contentious nature of what the Bible says about marriage, specifically the role of husband as head or leader and wife walking in submission to him, which is what I call an ordered partnership.

My top post of 2011 on this topic was my Wives Only Wednesday post “Love, Respect and Submission,” in which I try to more clearly define the words that seem to stir such strong emotions in many.  (This related post from 2010 also had a lot of traffic over the past year.)

The post above is part of my “What I Believe About Marriage” series, which also included another top hitter, a Man-up-Monday post entitled “Man Up and Lead with Love,” obviously targeted at husbands.

Not surprisingly, these two posts were the two most commented on posts in 2011 as well.  

My belief is that a significant majority of the problems in Christian marriage today is not that wives don’t want to submit to their husbands, but that many husbands refuse to step up and lead in a Christ-like manner. Supporting that claim is the fact that more search engine hits than any other in 2011 landed people on my post from 2010 “What if My Husband Won’t Lead.”


I don’t write a whole lot specifically about sex, even though I believe a mutually satisfying sex life is one of the most critical dimensions of marriage and one often neglected by the church. Thankfully there are a lot of Christian marriage bloggers who focus almost exclusively on encouraging the sexual dimension of marriages.

The fact that my number one post from 2011, in terms of page views, was “Sexual Surrender or Sexual Satisfaction,” leads me to believe that maybe I should write more sex-related posts.  This post is the first in a short series on sexual surrender that also includes one for wives, one for husbands  and a concluding post, which Shelia Gregoire quoted in her top 50 Marriage Quotes of 2011 list, which I wrote about in my last post. "Marriage is meant to be more about your surrender than about your satisfaction."



In December I started a new feature on romantic ideas that, despite its short time in the hit log, contained my second most popular post for the year, “Romantic Christmas Countdown.”  My only other romantic idea post, which was not actually mine but was “My Wife’s First Post,” was also in the top ten for the year.  I’m sure this is a feature which will get more attention in 2012, hopefully including another post or two from my lovely wife.


I believe strongly that body image issues represent one of the biggest intimacy killers among the large spectrum of marital issues. This belief is well-founded, judging by the number of views I received on my post “The Body Image Battle Continues.”  That post, directed at wives, was 4th overall in total views for the year. A related post was 5th overall, called “Pretty Amazing,” which includes a “pretty amazing” spoken word video.

If you are a husband, you should also check out my 2010 post “The Body Image Battle,” which is specifically targeted to get husbands engaged in the body image battle their wives face daily.  It still gets a lot of hits.


I spent a lot of time in back in 2010 focusing on the important topic of intimacy in marriage, and many of those old posts continued to get a lot of attention in 2011. One old post in particular, which claimed you can have as much intimacy as you want in your marriage, was actually 3rd in total page views in 2011.

The topic of intimacy continues to be extremely important to many of my readers, at least according to the ongoing new reader survey. Along that line, there was a top-ten 2011 intimacy related post, “What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You,” which expounds on the importance of knowing your spouse as completely as possible, to the very deepest parts of their being.  After all, I define intimacy as “being fully known and yet loved completely.”


So there you have the “hot topics” for 2011 according the what people were actually reading here over the year.

I’ll conclude by mentioning one other important old post for those of you who might be new to my blog. My “Bridal Paradigm Quick Reference on Surrendered Marriage” gives a good introduction to my blog.

Next time I’ll talk about some of my plans for 2012 here at Journey to Surrender.

In the mean time, if there are some topics you’d like to see more of this year or some features that you’ve particularly enjoyed, please leave a comment below.