By Andrea Guachalla
This past year has been a good one for Tasting the Ocean! Starting 2022 we had to make the difficult decision of posting one article every two weeks instead of one article every single week. That has made things more manageable for our small team of two (me as an editor and main contributor and my younger sister Carla as the graphic designer and social media manager). Posting less articles which led to a reduced workload each week allowed us to have several guest writers such as Gabrielle Stafford, pastor Theron St. John, my beloved mother Gimena Alarcón, and we were even able to post an article written by Carla in the beginning of December.
We were able to publish content about several topics including singleness, marriage, suffering, contentment, and the pro-life movement. What surprised me at a personal level was that two articles that I hadn’t planned to write beforehand had a greater reach compared to others (both made it to the top 5). Perhaps it is precisely because they were not planned and came out spontaneously that they are more relatable? I’m not sure. But it has been an interesting thing to see and analyze.
2022 has been a great year to grow, share ideas and work alongside my sister. I believe we both developed our abilities more and learned to not be discouraged by the number of likes, comments or criticism we get on social media, but rather focus on why we are doing what we are doing: encourage others to steward their time, gifts and resources to glorify and serve God.
With this new year some changes are coming, among those we will be reducing the amount of weekly posts we publish from 6 to 4. That means the reflections we used to do on Genesis on Fridays will be discontinued, and we will only share one post of rather the new article that is coming out that week, or a previous one on Tuesdays. Mondays and Thursdays will be reserved for devotionals on the Gospel of John which we started nearly a month ago, and on Saturdays we will continue to post a reflection on topics related to church life. Right now we are posting a series on the 70 Resolutions of Jonathan Edwards which we hope will help you set your mind in Christ before the Lord’s Day.
There is one more thing we have been planning for a while in order to make Tasting the Ocean self-sustainable in the long-run, but we are not ready to share any details yet. We will be sharing more on that in the near future if God confirms that is the way to go.
NOW! Without further ado, here are the 5 most read articles of 2022:
5. LESSONS LEARNED FROM TURNING 28
This is one of the articles I hadn’t planned to write and reached quite some people. I wrote it a bit after my birthday in March as I realized I had reached the age I had always dreaded and longed for: 28, the age my mother was when she married. The article is all about struggling with singleness, trusting God’s timing and finding joy even in those seasons one never expected to be in. You can read it by clicking here.
“You Shall Speak” is an interesting one, first of all because it’s not an article but a poem. Around mid-August I reached out to my mom to ask her to submit anything she would like to be published. She sent “You Shall Speak” along with a message saying: “It is a sad, but exhorting one”. When I read the poem I cried (honestly I cannot avoid crying when I read anything my mother writes). The poem is about how much we love comfort, and ignore the fact there is a God who will judge us for all our actions. When the time of judgment comes, we will have no other choice but to remain silent and HE SHALL SPEAK… A masterpiece! You can read it here.
3. DEAR SINGLE BROTHER, BE HONEST
This one was written by pastor Theron St. John. I had gotten familiar with pastor Theron’s work several years ago as I found a blog where he posted articles regularly. Back then I had read an article he had written about how important it is to prepare for marriage beforehand instead of just waiting around. That article titled “Be the Type You’re Looking For” changed my mindset completely and the way I was approaching this whole dating process. Fast forward in 2022 I asked him to write something similar and to include some of the lessons he learned as a newlywed, and that is how “Dear Single Brother, Be Honest” came to being. It is directed to young single men who desire to be husbands and fathers one day. To my young single brothers: do you yourself a favor and go read it NOW.
2. FOUR THINGS I LEARNED FROM MY DAD
I wrote this article as a way to honor my father, who passed away over 4 years ago. The article came out on August 16th, a day after the date of his passing. The truth is my father was very far from fulfilling his God-given role. As he spent his last years living with me and one of my siblings I often struggled with loving him genuinely. I prayed and begged God to help me honor the man He had given me as a father, and that’s what I did. As I wrote this article I decided to put all the bad things aside, and focus on what I did learn from Luis Guachalla, the man who I once called “dad”. You can read that one here.
This is the other article I wrote without planning to write it, and it came out of my very (single) soul. At that time I realized that, in my surroundings, there was a general and unhealthy obsession with surviving through singleness and focusing on what seemed to be the one single goal in life: marriage. I thought I was mature enough to handle comments about that, but soon I realized I was so affected by the general obsession with marriage that I no longer felt I was a true woman since I was single. I had to spend some time re-learning where my worth was and finding a balance between desiring marriage and being content in singleness. That was a bit rough, but I made it! And even though I considered erasing this article because of how personal it was, I’m glad I didn’t. You can read the article here.
There are 5 other articles that almost made it to the top 5 but didn’t, and I highly, highly recommend. These are:
6. NO MATTER WHAT THE WORLD SAYS, ABORTION IS NEVER SAFE by Gabrielle Stafford and Andrea Guachalla
7. DO THE HARD THING! by Andrea Guachalla
8. WHO WILL SAVE US? by Gimena Alarcón
9. WHEN SUFFERING COMES by Andrea Guachalla
10. BETTER TOGETHER: FIGHTING ISOLATION by Andrea Guachalla
Thank you all for sticking around this year. We pray all the work we are doing is edifying and helps you grow in Christ. Hopefully we will have more guest writers this year to touch on different topics and have more conversations with you all! Happy New Year, may the Lord use you to serve Him this 2023.
Keep up the good work.