I do two nice things for someone every day. That someone happens to be a dog. Rain or shine, sleep or none, I walk a mile in the morning and a mile in the evening with Spider. I meet other folks who also do at least one nice thing a day for a canine someone.

The whole business is embarrassing to my conscience because I realize I almost never make it a point in my daily schedule to do a concrete nice thing for a human. I rarely include in my to-do list: Write Nan a note telling her what her friendship means to me; greet the kids at the door when they come home from school; sneak up behind Calvin and give his aching shoulders a massage; ask Aimee to read me her latest poem.

I know a true story about a woman whose marriage was failing. She heard Elizabeth Elliot say on the radio to “love your enemy.” The woman had no stomach for all that, but she decided she could manage one nice deed a day toward her husband. The first day she baked a Jewish apple cake, his favorite. The second day another little something nice — just one.

The husband noticed. The wife discovered she was starting to enjoy doing it. The rest is history.

So what do you want to be when you grow up, worldontheweb.com? The perennial question is do you want to be a Time/ U.S. News & World Report/Drudge, like the big boys? Or do you want to be “Our Daily Bread”? Or both? The Board and CEO and Editor-in-Chief must lose a few Z’s over that one, while Mort Zuckerman sleeps like a baby.

But that’s because we have a more complicated situation. We come at everything we do — from putting out a magazine to taking out the trash — from a different perspective and mandate: What is “useful” information for a bondservant of Christ overlaps but is not identical to what is “useful” for a free-agent of the world. And it is “useful” for different reasons.

That is, current events is useful because the servant of Christ needs to know his world — in order to glorify God in it. “Daily Bread” stuff is useful because the servant of Christ needs to know the character and the instructions of his Master in order to please Him.

The subjective life is not despised by the Christian publisher because man is a whole being, and the whole of him belongs to God. (Truth be told, the other magazines, dimly groping after this truth intuitively, address the subjective life too, with “My Turn” features and self-help gurus and quasi-spirituality as part of its regular fare.).

There is no square inch of this universe — including the thought-life and affections — over which the Lord does not say “Mine!” If the big boys had known that, they would have expanded their definition of what is useful.