Category: Friends

Does it matter?

My friend Briana sent this to me this evening relating to my message yesterday.

Had to share it here. Not exactly sure of the origin or author. If you know, please feel free to share so I can give credit.

I was hungry and you formed a humanities club to discuss my hunger.

Thank you.

I was imprisoned and you crept off quietly to your chapel to pray for my release.

Nice.

I was naked and in your mind you debated the morality of my appearance.

What good did that do?

I was sick and you knelt and thanked God for your health.

But I needed you.

I was homeless and you preached to me of the shelter of the love of God.

I wish you’d have taken me home.

I was lonely and you left me alone to pray for me.

Why didn’t you stay?

You seem so holy, so close to God; but I’m still very hungry, lonely, cold, still in pain.

Does it matter?

re: What would you tell Obama?

I took a photo tonight for my memo to Barack Obama. Took it in the midst of another photo shoot with Laurie (so that’s the brief background on the suit and santa hat :-)).

I posted the photo to Facebook and Flickr and then decided – hey – why not create a Flickr group to let everyone share their memo’s to the president-elect.

So, I’m hoping that by the time you read this – this slideshow will be full of photos (and not just mine). But regardless – share yours and then tell a friend.

5 things I want to do…

Thomas tagged me over the weekend, asking what are 5 things you’ve always wanted to do…

I don’t know if these are things I’ve always wanted to do, but these are 5 things I really want to do (as of today)…

1. Spend at least two weeks visiting the UK (England, Scotland and Ireland) with Laurie.

2. Spend a week in New York City with Laurie.

3. Start a family :: aka have kids – (just don’t get any ideas that we’re planning on doing this tomorrow :-))

4. Freelance/work from home and/or own my own a business that supports my entire family so Laurie can also stay at home (and no I’m not interested in your pyramid marketing scheme). I’d love to see this as a regular paying gig on the radio (or a podcast), sharing people’s stories. Or — improving my web/video/media design skills so that I can make enough money to support my family with it.

5. Continue building real deep communities of faith.

In the process of building this list I also added a few more items to my life list over on 43things.com.

As part of the journey, I tag Laurie, Trucker Frank, Jessica, Brian, Michael, Kevin and Josh.

Tagged or not tagged, feel free to leave a list of the 5 things you want to do in the comment section below (or on your own blog)…

Things I’ve learned from Twitter (in the last 24 hours)

What we do

I was sharing with my life, Laurie, the other night that it’s amazing how intentional folks are on Twitter (and many on Facebook) about relationships.

I can send a txt message to 30 people and I don’t typically get any responses. I can share one message on Twitter – and within minutes 10 people from literally around the world let me know they’re praying for me. (UPDATE: I don’t mean that to say that folks who get my txt messages don’t care — see comments — but to hear or see someone actually say it does me good. I guess that’s why one of my big love languages is verbal/encouragement 🙂 ).

You really do have to be intentional about building relationships on Twitter. Otherwise it probably seems really pointless and a waste of time.

If you’re not into building relationships – you probably wouldn’t care that Jonny Baker is planning to live blog from an emerging worship conference in Oklahoma City.

Olly says girls have skills when it comes to putting on make-up in all sorts of situations.

Tripp Fuller and Chad Crawford scored an interview with Phyllis Tickle to discuss The Great Emergence. I’m looking forward to hearing the interview on their Homebrewed Christianity Podcast.

Mark Batterson is working on a new book – and likes to do it early in the morning.

Many people are still super buzzed about Obama’s election. However I think things are a little different for my friends over on Facebook. Does that make Facebook more conservative and Twitter more liberal? Or is just my friends?

Kevin Hendricks has written over 12,000 words in the novel he’s writing for nanowrimo.

Bruce Wagner has created a network at unitysocial.com. Looking forward to checking it out in a few minutes.

Sara Jane is going to UMHB’s homecoming this weekend.

Thomas went to see Sigur Ros last night while his wife stayed at home making Christmas cards and many of us on Twitter gave him a hard time about it. Today he found out he’s hosting a quiz for his team at work.

Trucker Frank is loading his truck in Shakopee MN, where it’s snowing a bit and then he’s heading to KC.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! If you’re still reading this, you should probably be on Twitter. If you’re not – well then I’m talking to myself – and my friends already on Twitter ;-).

The beauty of Twitter

Here’s one of those great articles I wish I had written. From @jontangerine… (HT to @stealingsand)

I like Twitter because…

It reminds me is that human beings are still tribal. As an example, if you check your own address book, or think about your family and friends, they probably number no more than two hundred people. We may have more in the book, but it’s rare for our intimates to be greater than two hundred people. Our networks are geographically dispersed these days. Even if your network is mostly in one location, people are so busy living that it can be difficult to stay in touch. Twitter is a facsimile of living and working in proximity for me, and provides something unique, too

Jon touches on a few things he’d like to see on twitter. I’d ditto those as well and add that I’d like to see easy ways to track physical locations as well. There are other social networks that will track your location. BrightKite will even alert you when other users or friends are in your area. A very cool feature indeed. But there’s not a good BrightKite app for Blackberry yet, so that’s a bit of a bummer for me and will probably keep me from switching anytime soon.

I also find this line from Jon’s article interesting, “but it’s rare for our intimates to be greater than two hundred people.”

I think that’s true in so many arenas of life. I only follow 66 people on twitter (and leave the SMS/txt message updates off for all but maybe 5 people) and while I have over 300 “friends” on facebook I really only keep up with/track half of them (if that). But of course it is nice when something catches my eye from those other 150ers and I can get updates on them as well.

I also see the 200 people limit playing out in churches/workplaces and more. It’s really hard to get to know more than 200 people or so in any regular setting. Even if there are 15,000 people in a room, do you really know more than 200 of them? Can you know more than 200 and build real relationships with them?

I think that’s what I love about online communities like Twitter. I know 10xs more about folks like @Jess_Hays and @sgalloway since they joined Twitter than I ever learned about them just seeing them for a couple hours on Sunday morning. The same goes for folks who constantly fill out surveys on Myspace. I learned tons of things about folks in my tribe thanks to them taking some time to be intentionally open.

What about you? What makes Twitter beautiful for you? Do you agree that it’s rare to have intimate relationships with more than 200 people? Do you think that number is much higher or less?