I started writing this post for 300wordsaday.com. I started while I was watching some people receive watches, people who have been following God professionally for 50 years.

I don’t mean that sarcastically. It’s just that they have been pastor couples or teacher couples or missionary couples for five decades.

I was ready to write about one of the guys, a teacher. And I was going to write about my dad. I was going to talk about their diligence, their commitment to excellence, their work that makes me want to throw my hands up and stop even trying.

And then the session ended. I wandered around the room. I found myself over by the teacher, behind him, behind some people talking with him. I waited. Several people talked with him. And then I thought, “I don’t need to wait” and so I turned around. And saw his wife, three rows back, sitting alone.

I greeted her.

She said, “I thought they were behind me and I turned and they weren’t, so I sat down to wait.”

I said, “It’s not the first time, is it.”

She smiled.

We chatted a bit, this other half of  a fifty year professional ministry team. He knows the Bible in three languages. She knows him. And four children. I don’t remember how many grandchildren. And she knows countless hours waiting in public spaces while someone thanks him or asks him or questions him.

My mother knows the feeling well. So does my wife. They both have waited patiently, encouragingly. They both have given their husbands wisdom and blessing and space.

I understood much better as I walked out of the room, out into the evening, back to an empty hotel room.

There is a price paid, usually willingly, by the one not in the spotlight.And I should write about their diligence, their commitment to excellence, their work that keeps me from ever thinking about throwing up my hands and stopping trying.

I’m glad I decided to turn around.

Two years ago I was in Portland.  I was at our denomination’s biennial conference. It is safe to assume that I was one of two people on twitter. The session on how churches could use the Internet focused almost entirely on a broadcast approach, rather than an interactive approach. (Streaming sermons, having pretty websites, advertising). As a digital person, I felt very alone.

That’s not completely true.

I took many friends with me. There was a wonderful online birthday party for me. But I felt like I was on the edge.

Today feels very different. When I searched twitter for “general conference” and “missionary church”, I found some people who I have already started following…and then met in person. Several of us are talking to each other and people from our local communities in real time using facebook.

There are still some challenges.

At an event like this, where voting will happen, you need to identify a “conference bar”, the voting section. When that area was identified, it excluded almost every area close to outlets. When we voted, there was a loud “no” vote from the corner where the outlets are. Everyone chuckled. No one without a laptop understood.

At an event like this, where reports are offered, the only way to respond is by standing up and asking. Someone just joked about putting a report on facebook. It would, however, be very helpful to gather comments in real time using the technology that many of us, many of the people who could be the future of our organization, are using anyway.

Both of those are illustrated in this facebook comment, (said mostly joking):

“I’m wondering if ____ is FB-bitter seeing that the rammed through vote moments ago put him on the front row–apparently a place where he is uncomfortable being on his laptop–I type this from the 2nd row (I want my old seat back.) ____, is the ability to vote really worth losing your FB privileges?”

However, we have made progress in the last two year. And I am grateful.

You are going to talk to some people this week who aren’t completely upbeat.

Some of them are just being cranky. They probably should be scolded.

One of them, however, just finished her first weak of chemo (an intentional typo). One of them found out he was losing his job the day he came back to work after his dad’s funeral, two days before another funeral. One of them has a world that seems to be collapsing on every front. One of them found out her grandson died suddenly. One of them is fighting depression and winning, but life feels very stretched out.

I know. We have every right to expect excellent service. After all, we’re paying for it (unless, of course, it’s free). We have every right to expect people to deliver on their promises, to be consistent, to be perfect, to deliver.

But behind the technology tools, behind the broken doors, behind the apparently carefully built brand, are people, not shiny objects or garbage cans.

We have every responsibility to expect people to be people.

Right?

It’s birthday time again. I turn 51 tomorrow (July 10).

Last year I put up a list of 8 things to do for my birthday. It led to a number of really nice stories of people helping other people. So I decided that I want the same things again.

1. If you know someone who can’t afford to go out to lunch with your office group, slip them a $10 anonymously. Bring them into community. (If you don’t know someone, send something to the local rescue mission.)

2. If you know someone who is fighting cancer or Alzheimer’s or panic attacks or depression, sit with them, listen to them. (To know how, see Jim Hughes.)

3. If you know someone who locked up for something they didn’t do–or even something they did–send them a note. If you can, visit them. Talk to them. The people I know who have been on “ankle bracelets” could use someone being kind.

4. There are people who go shopping at Goodwill and Salvation Army. They can’t afford more than the $2 for a pair of slacks. So pack a bag and drop it off.

5. Sometimes people get to demand your time (bosses in particular). Throw one of those people off-balance by offering to help on the next part of the project.

6. Shake hands with someone who no one else will touch. Or at least look them in the eye and talk to them.

7. Tell God that you can’t figure everything out yourself.

8. Find a little kid–a niece, a neighbor, your own–and listen for how they talk about what they believe. Listen to their trust.

That’s it. Do one of those things for me. Tell them Jon sent you.

(It will be easier to explain an internet friend than explain that Jesus said these things, too, in Matthew 25.)

I talked with a friend who was going on vacation. He forgot his laptop. He drove back home to get it. He got scolded.

But the vacation was as much a retreat, as much a time to think, as pure escape. And, like me, my friend thinks with his fingers.

I talked with a friend who was grieving a loss. A deep loss, the kind that, when you think about it, rips your guts. And he was talking about this loss pretty analytically. And feeling bad about it.

I reminded my friend that if he were a woodworker, he would go build something, lose himself in physical work. And we would look at that and think that was somehow noble grief. But my friend works with his mind, not chisels. He carves detailed arguments, he sands away imprecisions, he assembles understanding from carefully measured, Kilns-dried lumber. And so, of course, he is working out his grief with the tools he knows.

It is possible, of course, that I have odd friends.

It is possible, of course, that grieving and resting take acceptably different forms for different people.

It is possible, of course, that my friends understand how their brains work.

It is possible, of course, we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

——-

(It is possible that someone caught the C.S. Lewis allusion and will win a copy of  “Poems”  – just because they tell me what the reference is.)

All she wanted was a picture with a baseball player.

All he said was, “I don’t have time for that right now.”

He was sitting in the bullpen. He’s the catcher that helps the relief pitchers warm up. For the first six innings, he sat on the end of the bench. Except when he walked to the dugout and then walked back.

He was anything but busy. He had nothing but time.

Except for a 15-second picture with an 18-year-old.

I know that you are going to say, “but he has to concentrate, he has to stay in the game. If he looked like he was having fun, posing with the fans, flirting with the girls, it would hurt his chances to move up from Class A baseball.”

I agree completely.

But notice that he is sitting right next to the fence where Hope is standing. This new ballpark in Fort Wayne has been created so that fans feel close to the field. It’s not even feeling close to the field; it IS close to the field. The bottom row of seats is at the same level as the playing field. You can touch the players.

You feel like you are part of the game. There is the illusion of closeness, of transparency, of immediacy. During the game, however, it is only an illusion. A physical wall is replaced with a distance.

It would be better, in many ways, to have more of a barrier. It would protect the players from expectations of accessibility.

I guess as a dad, I should be glad. And we did, after all, get our picture.

But I also learned something about seeming to be accessible if I’m really not. Assumed openness disappoints customers…and readers.

Hope has been part of the Youth Chorale of the Fort Wayne Children’s Choir for three years, younger choirs, for four more years. In those seven years, she has never heard the choir she was part of sing.

We’ve been in the audience, of course, listening, cheering (silently), moved. But Hope has always been on the platform.

Until Tuesday night. Tuesday night, her choir sang and she sat with us, in the audience, watching her friends singing a practice concert before they head to Newfoundland to be part of a wonderful choir festival.

She’s not going.

Music is core to her, music is how she expresses herself, music is Hope. This last year she was part of more choirs and ensembles and events than I can count. She loves it.

So why is she sitting in the audience?

Last fall she had to decide what to do this summer. She looked at the tour with the choir (which originally was to Europe). A wonderful time. Fabulous opportunity.

She decided to go to West Virginia instead.

Hurricane, West Virginia, doesn’t have cathedrals. No festival choir, no orchestra. Just a work camp with about 400 people  meeting to scrape paint, and paint walls and help people.

Why?

Because although music is Hope, the music has to come from somewhere. And for her, last fall, it came from a choice to do something that wouldn’t be for her. She talked with God. They decided to go to West Virginia.

She’s a good kid. But she’s not the only one who makes choices every day to serve other instead of self. You’ve done it. I’ve done it. A bunch of guys a couple hundred years ago did it. One guy a couple thousand years ago did it.

Sometimes those choices cost us our comfort. Sometimes they cost our lives. And sometimes we sit and listen to the music that we could have been singing and think, “I miss that.”

And then we get up and go back to work with a smile, knowing that it would have been fun. But so is changing the world.

Grabill Missionary Church started more than one hundred years ago.

Here’s how it happened.

In 1898, a bunch of like-minded people were meeting in small groups in fifteen church buildings and school houses, all served by a couple brothers who were preachers, all within a circle about 12 miles across. Some of the places had preaching services, some of them had Sunday school.

Some of the people in these small gatherings came from other churches, responding to a new (for them) understanding of what the Bible taught. Others came from no church at all. There was great excitement about the new things God was doing, and some resistance from those who had learned the old way.

In 1900, the railroad decided to build a town and the spreadout groups started talking about a central location.  In November, 1901, a church building was dedicated. In January, 1902, the first train went by. In February, 1902, the first plat of the town was filed.

At the time, people from the congregation saw each other all the time. They lived within walking distance. They shopped from each other, traded goods, chatted while at the post office or hardware store. They lived local.

Much of the conversation was, I’m guessing, pretty mundane. People talked about weather and sick animals. They mentioned that they needed to get some work done. They mentioned coffee.

This mundane conversation was, however, the fabric of community. You can’t talk about deep spiritual concepts all the time. Sometimes you just talk. And in that chatter grows connection and in that connection can grow faith. Particularly when you watch what happens in a life across time, how a person handles crisis.

Community is formed in communication and communion, interaction and intimacy. The more of both, the deeper the relationships.

In churches, that kind of interaction doesn’t happen easily anymore, at least not for large parts of a congregation. The technology of the car has made it possible to travel further to church, to shop, to eat, to live. A community is less defined by geography.

Churches, at least wise ones, respond by creating additional times of interaction. We create small groups or Sunday school classes where people can share life together. Or that’s what we hope. And sometimes people are aware of what is happening in each other’s lives daily, and sometimes not.

And for a long time, no one has known any better. We’ve known that more communication and communion would be nice, that our sense of community was suffering, but we figured that we were like the rest of American culture, feeling the disconnection that comes from distances.

And then came a new set of communication tools. They are simple enough for almost anyone to use. They are cheap enough for almost anyone to afford (as cheap as a free library card if necessary). We call them social media. We could call them “small town streets”

Just like people were able to chat with each other while heading to the store or waiting at the mill or taking the milk to the creamery, people now can chat while sitting at home. And some of the conversations sound the same, about weather or work or coffee. Or the neighbor’s odd behavior at midnight every night.

At first, only one or two people in a congregation knew about these tools. The first person to talk about Twitter or Facebook or Myspace was viewed as peculiar. When it was explained that this was an Internet thing, all the stories about bad people lurking in chat rooms to injure children were mentioned.

A funny thing has happened, however. More people are becoming aware of these tools. Parents and then grandparents discover new ways to see pictures of the trips that their children or grandchildren are taking. And then conversations like this happen as a small group from a church gets together.

A: “How was that phone call this afternoon?”

B: “It was great. He’s doing well.”

A. had heard about the phone call from looking at B’s facebook status.

To look at social media as a new evangelism tool, just like broadcasting was viewed, misses one of the core values of social media: transparent interaction. Rather than thinking of social media (facebook, twitter, myspace, youtube, blogs, flickr) as a new broadcasting tool, churches are probably wisest to think of it as a way to live life together away from Sunday morning, to live in the community as a community, like churches that make a difference usually do.

There are some cautionary notes, however.

• We can’t fall into believing that this way is the best way, that people not on Facebook are somehow missing out. In fact, congregations using social media have to be more aware than ever of the need to be redundant, to provide key information in as many forms as possible, to foster communication and communion wherever possible.

• We have to remember that what is online is a search away. I have chuckled sadly at the times I have read online comments about how to reach people on the Internet, how to convert “lost people.” There has been a complete lack of understanding that those “lost people” can read what is being said about them.

• Social media is a place where the new is addictive. I spend time bouncing from platform to platform wondering if there is something new, if someone said something that I need to respond to. This fear of missing out (FOMO) is an addiction of sorts. Of course, people probably spent too much time chatting in front of Grabill Hardware, too. But no one ever thought the answer was to tear the porch off.

Technology is not relationship. Jesus did not talk about technologies, he talked about people. However, it the technology allows more frequent interaction, even about the details of life, then maybe we can build the same kind of community that happened in the early days of our congregation.

——————–

For more on online/offline as a difference on tools rather than a difference between real life/fake life, see Liz Strauss’s wonderful post Online Culture: is your definition out of date?.

For history on Grabill, Indiana see Grabill.net.

Grabill Missionary Church is on facebook at www.facebook.com/grabillmissionary.

That’s how much of the year is gone.

Six months. Seems like years. Seems like days.

I decided to give the two of us a way to evaluate these six months. I hope it helps.  Pour yourself a cup of coffee (or something) and sit on the deck and let’s reflect a bit.

—————————————————–

1. I actually know more about these three people than I did 6 months ago.

________                  ________                       ________

1a. And here are three things I know about them.

2. If I add my blogs posts together, I have written this many words that wouldn’t otherwise be written: ______

3. Though I wish I’d done more, I have to admit that I’ve given this much _________ (time, money, stuff) to help other people.

4. Though it isn’t as much as I think it should be, I have talked to God _____________ times  and I stopped to listen _____________ times.

5. I’ve read about ____ (#)  topics.  ___% of them had nothing to do with my job.

6. I have told _______ and _______ how much I care about them _______ times a ________ (day/week/year).

7.  Six months ago I didn’t know how to __________ and now I do.

8.  Though the list keeps growing, I have to admit that I’ve crossed at least ______ items off my to do list every _____ (day/week/month).

Bonus: Go back and write the numbers and phrases and people that you want to be able to list on December 30.

Air keeps you alive. Heroin does, too.
When you go without both you get twitchy.
When you go without both you might die.
More accurately, when you go without air, you will die.
When you go without heroin, you want to die. For awhile.
You feel like you are dying. for awhile.
No one lives without air.
Most people live without heroin.
And the ones who don’t slowly die.

———

Is my twitter/facebook/email/text/rss/twitter/facebook/email/txt/rss/twitter stream air?

or heroin?