Last Exit Before Oblivion

There's Lu, with her "drama queen" antics and great swings. Read one post and you know she's alive.

There's the Preacher, deeply thoughtful, hoping he's not lost. He gives me a lot to think about, being more engaged with what's going on around him than I am.

Wendy's breezy style runs way under the surface. There are secret depths inside there that I don't know if I will ever understand.

Paula really puts her life into her words. No beating around the bush. You know what's going on with her that moment. I don't know her well, having just been introduced, but I look forward to reading what she offers.

The Preacher wrote "What if you and I could set aside all the church bullshit for a little while? I’m serious. Just for the purpose of a good conversation..."

What a wonderful dream. It was a reality in my life, but that was years ago. We were all young, all lost, all the same age. We knew what to talk about and we knew that talking was important. We could build bridges over the chasms between us, and doing so was worth the time required.

Community is, most of the time, just a word. People, especially Christians, talk about it a lot. Christians point to the Book of Acts and make much noise about how that's what they want. They don't, however, choose to sit down as the Preacher suggested and just... talk. They choose to get involved with programs and schedules and plans. "We'll talk soon," they say, but soon never comes.

You can't make a relationship at the rate of one meeting per month. You just can't learn who another person is with an occasional dinner. You have to be with them in many different ways: working on cars, doing sound in a church, taking a walk, helping with hard things. That latter is nearly impossible unless you know the person, and you can't know them unless you've put in the time.

That early community I had came apart, as these things do. People left school, got married, moved to other places. As Lu mentioned in one of her posts, it's out of sight, out of mind.

Maybe it's because I'm good with abstract things. To me, a letter is almost as good as a face-to-face meeting, and it is most certainly better than the nothing that usually happens. But no one responds. Today we have more ways to communicate than ever, but the air is filled with noise and fluff.

Now, why is it that some people have chosen to put their hearts into Weblogs? This little group is closer to a community than anything I've experienced in years (except for the MBH tech team!), and it just sort of happened. Those chasms between people can be bridged with writing as well as voice.

Everyone denigrates the Internet. There is a lot of junk. There's also some treasure. Very similar in that regard to everything in life.