Linc Ashby, Blogging...

Here I sit.  It’s 9:30 on Tuesday evening.  Glenn emailed last week to remind me that I have a post due – tomorrow as I write, today as you read.  Last minute, again!  It’s been a pretty typical day.  I rolled out of bed at 5:00 am to do something I absolutely love.  Tryouts started yesterday for the high school basketball team I help coach.  Following practice I raced home to take my oldest daughter to kindergarten, returned home to take a shower, then poked along in rush hour traffic on the west loop while listening to NPR on my way to the church office.  I spent the morning doing Monday morning church office stuff.  Trust me, don’t ask.  At 11:40, I went to our monthly pastor’s lunch – I know, weird start time.  Then, I visited a family in our church who survived a horrible automobile accident this weekend.  Their SUV flipped six times, skidded two-hundred feet, only one of them was wearing a seat belt, yet they all walked away from the accident, including the family dog, with just a few minor cuts and bruises.  That’s grace.  I was a little perturbed though because they live way out in the suburbs.  That’s horrible, my attitude that is.  But sadly, it’s true.  My tune changed once I was with them.  Physical presence has a way of doing that.  God is so good to me.  And I managed to make it back with just enough time to run home and see my family before I had to leave again.  Even more grace.

“Church in the Park” is a ministry to homeless people organized by some students at Rice University.  That’s where I went tonight with my youth group.  There was a very small turn out, only a few students from our church showed up (I confess I expected this) and only one homeless gentleman came out (I didn’t expect this), who, incidentally, had to write what he wanted to tell us on sheets of paper that one of the organizers had ripped out of the back of her bible because his voice box is being repaired, or something like that.  At one point he wrote, “Jesus wept is the only bible verse I know.”  That brought a chuckle.  I have to believe Jesus was pleased.  Otherwise, I’ll feel like I wasted my entire night.  That leaves the few precious moments I have right now, the ones that will pass as I type, during which I’ll either spend some time loving my wife (as she sits beside me nursing our newborn baby), or I will, of all things, blog, while feeling totally guilty that my wife is now in the bathroom getting ready for bed.

A wise old minister once told me: if you think you shouldn’t say it you should probably say it.  So, here it goes. I really don’t understand the point of what I am doing right now.  Welcome to my head on the eve of a post.  Seriously, who has time for this?  I hear rumors of people out there – I guess you know who you are – who literally spend hours a day everyday visiting various blogs like this one, posting, reading, commenting, responding, whatever.  It makes me want to scream, “GO LOVE SOMEBODY!”  “Sure,” I told Glenn when he called me over a year ago, “I’d love to be a part of an online community.”  Secretly I was thinking, finally, somebody to listen to all the good things I have to say.  That’s a horrible attitude again.  And God help me, but I might as well keep going.  The only time I am out here is when I have posted something.  Why?  I am consumed with trivial matters like how many comments an entry I have written generates, which is to say, I worship what a whole of lot people – most of whom I don’t even know – think about me, or even more pitiable, if they think anything at all about me.  Surely Jesus shakes his head in wonder, saying something like this: why don’t you demonstrate the same fervor in listening to your wife as you do when you frantically pull out your BlackBerry as it buzzes to inform you of a possible new response to your most recent post?  Anybody else out there struggling with this?  Maybe I’m the only one that’s this self-absorbed. 

Is there any plausibility to the possibility that we are so inept at loving one another face to face that we have to create things like blogging to insure some pathetic measure of appreciation or encouragement or value or identity or worth in these tangled and wrecked lives of ours?  Perhaps this rant will result in my dismissal from the community, or maybe one of you, maybe even a few of you, maybe all of us will spent one less hour online and one hour more in the life of somebody whose face we can actually touch, like my wife’s, whose is resting softly on her pillow sound asleep, once again her husband in the other room, his laptop battery running low.

Comments

[GL]

Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch.

You know how to hurt a blogger. :)

[Linc Ashby]

In the middle of the night a very good friend - Alex - wrote the following to me:

"Linc, I saw your post at CGO while taking a break. I am not one of those frequent blogreader dudes (I'm more of a flood-my-friends'-inboxes dude:). But, at the risk of sounding offensive, I was surprised by your post. CGO is full of regular bloggers and commentors who love others. Maybe not many of them served homeless people today, but the Church has SO many great people who both blog a lot and love people a lot. In my opinion, some people are just wired to love reading and writing, and blogs provide that context. Why do we all have to assume that other people with other tendencies don't love as well as we do? This email may sound rude, and if so I will deeply regret it tomorrow."

Glenn and Alex, I respect the two of you very much. I believe I went too far. At the time it seemed justifiable. I am particularly saddened by the fact that I communicated some kind of pietistic commitment to the poor (thanks for pointing this out, Alex) when in all honesty I wrote, "otherwise, I'll feel like I wasted my entire night," because that's exactly what I did feel when I finally got home. Glenn, it's still early. If you want to remove the post entirely then that's fine with me.

[Jeannie]

thanks for writing this. quite refreshing.

Honestly, there are those of us who feel like we're dying beneath fluorescent lights in office buildings, since we agreed to be personal assistants, accountants, or a host of other office jobs. I am struggling against depression as I ask myself what my next job should be, how can I escape internet and blog surfing days, and how in the world did i get to this place in life? But for today, I am here in this exact job in corporate America facing the endless cycle of political squabbles, because God has called me to serve my boss and her familiy. And your blog (and others) have shed some light into my little corner.

But I agree. We are so inept at loving each other well, and we turn to our blackberry, mailbox, voicemail, or blog to find pathetic reassurance.

Dr. Martyn-Lloyd Jones writes, “We are all so dependent on the things that are being done for us and to us and around and about us, that is has become difficult to live our own lives. The world is organizing life for us in every respect and we are becoming dependent upon it.”

[Bet]

Sounds like you had a frustrating day yesterday, Linc. It's easy to let frustration color everything in our world when that happens.

Could you think of ministering face-to-face and ministering by blogging not as an "either/or" but as a "both/and" proposition? I know many who are blessed and encouraged by reading thoughtful posts by those who write here and elsewhere. Sure, there are some who abuse the Internet and spend way too much time in the blog-world to the neglect of the real one where God has placed them. But there can be value here as well.

[Linc Ashby]

Bet and Jeannie, I appreciate both of your comments. Jeannie, I admire your commitment to serve your boss - this certainly reflects Christ. And Bet, I am certainly of the "both-and" stripe instead of the "either-or". I've found - for better or for worse I guess - that the other side of the continuum must sometimes be pitched in a rather dramatic way for us to see it. I confess I abuse all sorts of things. I certainly want my posts to be thoughtful and encouraging and I am thankful for a community that keeps me singularly focused on that. At the time I thought what I said needed to be said. Perhaps I've not achieved that goal this time.

[Alex]

As the Alex referenced in Linc's above comment, I wanted to clarify a few things:
- Linc is a total stud.
- Linc doesn't have a pietistic bone is his body.
- I've been up late all week with a pending move, and I think that there has to be some verse about how moving justifies a multitude of sins, including my snide commentary above and whining about packing while not actually packing. Either that or my heart's sinful.
- My only point was that other people's hobbies are easier to juxtapose against nobler activities than our own. I, for one, firmly believe that if you watch baseball, you are on solid biblical ground. But woe is he who watches golf when he could be visiting nursing homes.;)

Love you, dude.
Alex