My first experience with digital interaction came about twelve years ago when I started posting on a political bulletin board.  I would peruse the boards nightly and add my two cents’ worth when I felt like it.  I started out as nothing more than a reader.   I learned that I could hide behind a secret identity, which could be changed whenever I felt like it.  I got my husband involved, too, and he started to get into it.  He made a few friends online and he still receives messages from them to this day. 

As for me, I got frustrated with the pointlessness of it all and I didn’t like dealing with the flamers.  Flamers are those who start posting provocative things just to get others riled up, and it usually works.   I lost interest in it after a while until I started to blog about six years ago.  I started to blog because I wanted to hone my writing skills a bit.  

When you’re sitting at home behind a computer, you don’t always think about the reader.  You are thinking about your words and how they make you feel.  Then someone comes along and they read those words and they can often mean something totally different to them or that person can just glean something totally different from the words than you ever expected or intended.  One would think that that kind of interaction is impersonal, but I wouldn’t say that at all. 

I have different groups of friends.  I made a lot of friends at my tennis club.  I have a group of work friends who brown bag lunch and eat in the lunchroom most days.  I also have my digital friends who drop me an email or comment on my posts.  I could choose to distance myself from any of those friends in any of a number of ways.  I stopped playing tennis a while ago, and haven’t connected with my tennis friends lately.  I could stop eating lunch in the lunchroom, and lose my connection with the lunching ladies, and I could stop signing on and posting regularly with my digital buddies.  Instead, I keep trying to keep those connections open with those I interact with, no matter what the mode of interaction is.

I don’t think that we should underestimate the power of our words.  Whether they are written on a web site, bulletin board, or spoken out loud, they are pretty powerful.  Growing up, most of us have heard the saying, “Sticks or stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”  It was a well-intentioned saying that was supposed to get us through the difficult growing up years, but now I don’t think that that old saying is true at all.  Words do hurt and they heal, too.  Words are important and they shouldn’t be wasted.  They should be used, but used sparingly and used to bring God’s light into the world.  Words that lift people up keep relationships going and we were built to be in relationships–all kinds of relationships–virtual or literal.