It’s easy to forget that people are real, just as real as you and when we forget that, we quickly become apathetic to their plight.

Castle

Last night, I watched the episode of ABC’s ‘Castle’ in which Alyssa Milano guest stars.

The episode itself was fairly good, Castle is one of my favorite shows, but what really stood out to me was the difference in my viewing experience due to the fact that Alyssa Milano is a prolific tweeter.

I’ve never met Ms. Milano and have only once actually interacted with her through Twitter, but just from reading her tweets, it has become obvious to me that she is a real person, not some computer generated image in a movie.

During the filming of her ‘Castle’ episode, she tweeted a few times about how she was feeling, even posting a picture of the sweater she wore to her first day on set. (I believe the sweater has the words “New people scare me” written on it)

Consequently, as I was watching the show, I felt as if I was watching someone I knew, someone real. Although she played her character well, I felt like I could separate the character from the actress. Maybe for the first time ever I could actually see that this person on screen was more than just a fictional character but a real human being as well.

If anything, this realism actually made the viewing experience better as I could appreciate the talent of the actress more than ever before.

Empathy

As I was thinking about this today, I realized how difficult we find it to empathize with people in other places who are going through difficult situations. Take the disaster in Haiti for instance. We see the pictures and read and hear the reports of the terrible devastation and suffering but we struggle to think of the people as actually being real and we’ve never been there so we don’t know what it looked like before. It’s too far removed from us.

We probably also struggle because the culture is different. People wear different clothes than us and have different hair styles, they come from a slightly different gene pool so their skin color and facial features are not quite what we used to.

They don’t look like us, they don’t talk like us, their cities don’t look like ours and so it is hard to comprehend that they are real humans who have needs like us and desires like us, who have hopes and aspirations, who are intelligent, friendly, loving and caring. People who like to have fun and laugh and sing and watch sports. People who love good food and drink. People who need a Starbucks coffee to get started in the morning. People with families, with lives, with personalities.

In short, it’s hard to understand that they are people just like us. Someone on twitter described it as being hard to remember that they are people with souls.

We see so many fictional characters on our TV screens that we find it hard to connect that these people are not fictional, they are real, hurting, desperate human beings who need every last bit of help we can give.

React

There are so many people around the world who need our help and our love, Haiti is taking all of the media coverage at the moment but the billions who are dying of treatable disease, starvation and thirst still need us as much today as they did before the Haitian earthquake.

I want to encourage you today to look past the things you don’t understand and which seem ‘different’ to you and view those in need everywhere as your brothers and sisters, fellow human beings who need our help – who need YOUR help today.

I have met many amazing and talented people through the wonders of the internet. In fact, the more people I meet, the more I realize that EVERYONE has amazing gifts, some clearly visible, some hidden beneath the surface.

That’s why I’m coming to you all for help.

People tell me I’m creative, but it’s really not that true. I do a lot of creating but I don’t have that inventive, creative, artistic spark which is so necessary to take a something that final step from being just a good idea to being a great product.

Something like five years ago, my wife and I started a small business providing low cost website hosting for small churches, charities and businesses.

We created two websites, one to aim at the churches and charities and the other to aim at small businesses.

After much discussion over many days, we came up with the names Heavenly Hosts (for the site aimed at churches) and Stoneage Hosting (for the site aimed at helping small businesses get out of the stoneage and into the digital age).

Those businesses have been fairly successful – to the degree that we’ve worked on marketing them – but now we want to add a third string to our bow.

As I have begun to slowly immerse myself in the world of authors, aspiring authors and bloggers I have increasingly seen the need for low cost hosting for these people who are desperately trying to build a platform and establish a presence on the web.

I’ve taken on some additional server capacity and am looking to start up a website from which to sell hosting to bloggers and writers.

I can build the website OK, my problem though is coming up with a NAME… and that’s where you come in.

Can you help me think up a catchy name that I can use for the website?

I’ve been thinking of something like bloghosting.com but, of course, someone thought of that before me… So I need something creative, something catchy, something that will capture the imaginations of prospective customers – or at least give them some idea just from the name what we’re all about.

So it’s over to you, you creative geniuses!

What can you come up with? What do you think I should call this new website?

Any helpful suggestions would be very much appreciated. Any unhelpful yet witty suggestions would also be appreciated, I need a good laugh!

Last week, on Tech Tuesday, I encouraged you to have a plan before you dive into the world of Social Media /Social Networking.

If you haven’t read that post, go read it, or the rest of this won’t make a whole lot of sense.

The basic premise of this concept is that if you don’t have a plan as to how you are going to approach social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and things like blogs, vlogs and trogs (ok, I made that last one up, but trogs is an awesome word) then they will quickly overwhelm you and you could quickly feel like you’re drowning in a fast moving whirlpool.

I realize though that making a plan is not easy. How do we plan if we’re not sure what we want to achieve?

This week, I’m not going to try to give you more lists of things to do and not do, instead I’m going to offer some help:

If you are wanting to make a plan but don’t know where to begin, or you have questions and want some help or advice, I’d like to try to help.

Simply leave a comment on this post or use the CONTACT link at the top of this page and I’ll respond as soon as possible.

I can’t promise I’ll be able to solve all of your problems or answer all of your questions, but I’ll do what I can to help you figure out where you’re going and point you in the right direction.

Drop me a line!

Peter

I am an addict.

I’m an all or nothing kind of guy.

This is a problem!

When I do things, I do them with everything I have in me. When I don’t do things, I just don’t do them.

This has been a pattern in my life for as long as I can remember. 

The problem I have with blogging is that I throw myself into it and then I get obsessed with my blog stats and spend every spare minute of every day, and lots of minutes that aren’t really spare checking my stats, seeing how my latest post is doing, who has read it, whether they responded etc etc.

I just can’t switch off.

So then I get obsessed with finding ways to promote my blog and with writing blog posts every day. I find as many different ways as possible to get statistics on my blog and try to employ different strategies to promote my blog.

Some of this is pure vanity but much of it is down to the fact that I’m thinking to myself “I’m doing all of this work writing and I truly believe that I’m writing what God gives me to write so I’d love for more people than just me and my imaginary friend, Bob, to read it.”

On top of all that, my site starts doing OK in Google searches and I’m getting people arriving every day from search engines because they have been searching for things like:

• ‘More of Christ and less of me’
• ‘How to show Christian love’
• ‘How to die to yourself’
• ‘what the bible says about hating people’
• ‘How to find a church that actually loves God’
• and for a while, every week I was getting people searching for where President Obama went to church that week – why they got sent to my site I have no idea!

Every day people are visiting my blog looking for the answers to these and many, many other questions – and I’m feeling the pressure of maybe not having to give them the right answer but definitely not giving them the wrong answers.

All of that leads to pressure on me. Pressure to write better posts, pressure to find more readers, pressure to interact with readers who comment. Pressure which is all imaginary.

On top of that, I cant be in the blogging world without reading blogs – and there are SO many great blogs out there to read. There are currently 46 blogs in my feed reader, the majority of which post every day. It takes a long time to read all of those and then comment on all of them. Then I have to check back every 15 minutes for the rest of the day to see if anyone has replied to my comments.

Before I took my little sabbatical, which I don’t really seem to be back from yet, I was probably spending 6 – 8 hours a day reading blogs, writing mine and monitoring stats and responses.

That was on top of being a pastor, being a full-time stay-at-home dad to 3 kids, trying to be a good husband, running a web-hosting business and  trying to find time to have a life.

I burned out and I don’t know what the answer is. It has taken me weeks or even months, I don’t remember how long it has been, to get to the point where I can even write this.

Blogging is such a great cognitive tool for me and the replies I get to my posts are so helpful, they help me see more clearly and learn more of what God is trying to teach me but how do I blog without becoming addicted and obsessed?

I’m really lost here. I don’t know how to go forward in 34 years of life I have not yet worked out how to have a balanced approach to things. How do I stay in the blogging world without committing every moment, every fibre of my being to it? How do I do that with anything?

Any suggestions?