For the first time in years, I have joined - albeit tentatively - a blog-community. Author John Shore has a marvelous website, with an engaged, thoughtful community interacting on any number of topics.
A takeaway from my own recent experiences there is one of reinforcement. My own sense that what we say, how we live our lives, matters, is supported by a series of posts John has done recently on the relationship between Christianity and being gay. I have often said that I do not take myself very seriously at all; I do take the subject matter with which I deal very seriously, however, because it deals with life and death stuff, people's lives. Even my occasional forays in to issues of art - literature and music and film - fall in to this category because our art tells us who we are. This stuff matters. It is life and death stuff.
While bloggers are still the target of all sorts of disdain, we should never lose sight of the reality that we are just people. Yet, we are precisely people who are doing stuff that matters. It matters because we are talking about life and love and fear. Our words reach the whole world, whether we know it or not.
My hope and prayer is that we remember, each and every day, that the stuff we say matters. People can live or die because of stuff we say. It's a really tremendous responsibility to put our words out there for everyone to see. Even when we are angry, we should express our anger with love, and a sense that it is a righteous anger.
