Thursday, March 29th. The 37th day of Lent.
In the early days of blogging, back before there were more blogs than people, the comments were much more interesting. It was kind of a novel thing to leave a comment. Early comment systems didn’t have spam filters or other controls. On my first blog, you couldn’t edit or delete comments. And initially, there weren’t many Christians reading my first blog. So a lot of the comments were from people who were not part of the American Church culture.
I was a little sad when Christians found Real Live Preacher. Things changed after that.
Yesterday I received a rather challenging comment on one of my Lenten posts. I liked it. The person who read my post had a beef and aired his or her opinion. It was like the old days.
Here is the comment. The user who left it used the name Jesus Christ:
“Your church is about 1.9 million people and shrinking away rapidly; your immense delusions of relevance and pointless ceremonies are some of the reasons why I am delighted to have nothing to do with religion.”
I was very happy to see this comment. Seriously, it felt like the old days at Real Live Preacher. Here was my response:
With great humility I acknowledge that everything said in this comment may be true. I don’t know the person who posted it. I don’t know if the person is truly angry about things he or she has seen in the Church or if he or she just wanted to make a splash by saying something at odds with the general tone of this blog.
The intent behind the comment doesn’t really matter, because there is truth in it. There may be no God at all, in which case I suppose there is a certain futility in all that has been done in the name of religion. Or perhaps – more frightening – there is a God and God has washed his hands of the Church, just as Pilate washed his hands of Christ.
This may be. It’s something I think about all the time. But of course I am a very small person in the world. And the only proper response I can give is to try and be as loving and caring to the world and to people as I can. So that my efforts to serve God will come to some small goodness, regardless of the answers that will someday be revealed to the larger questions of life.
Anyone else miss the good old days of blogging, when stuff like this happened in the comments? Nowdays, I think the conversations have migrated over to Facebook. And that’s fine. It is what it is. Things change. But still, it was very cool to be a blogger back in 2003.
Gordon
