Christians in an age of blogging

I just spent some time reading the news on the internet. We have always been newspaper addicts and I guess the habit has crossed over into the cyber world. I don`t usually do more than read the main news articles, but today I followed a story from one thing to another and ended up on a New York Times Blog. It started out as a kind of introductory article by a woman named Amy who I suppose is famous, but not in Santa Barbara, Honduras, so I hadn`t ever heard of her before. Apparently she is a believer who is going to be writing on this blog about religion among other things. As far as I could tell it was her first time writing on this particular blog.

In this article, she wrote about hula hoops. I guess the future first lady is a great hula hooper. I never was very good at it, but I remember the great hula hoop competition downtown in Muscatine, Iowa when I was in grade school. The article had no great intellectual purpose--she just wrote it for fun, I suppose. I started reading through the responses, thinking they would be about hula hoops, or slinkies, or jumprope. Not at all. It was, for the most part, one hateful comment after another about Christianity/religion/faith in general. The original article wasn`t even about this lady's faith. Just the fact that she is a person of faith seemed to be enough.

I wondered--is that how Christians sound to unbeliever's ears? I wondered what had happened to these people, somewhere along the road, that their immediate reaction to a believer, even when she talks about hula hoops, is so intensely negative. I don't envy Amy. I suppose she is required to read the responses to what she writes.

Lord, help all of us who are Yours, to speak (or blog) truth to one another and to the world around us, but may the truth we speak be saturated in Your love for those who hear it. We will probably not always be understood, but may our words honor You, and be filled with compassion. While we need to use the intellect you have given us, it is not our arguments that will convince others. Help us, Lord, to point people to Jesus.