On Conversation

If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.

—Philippians 2:1–2

In the last few years, I’ve been hurt by careless and unkind words about me and my books online. But way before that, I was a pastor’s kid, and I heard people say terrible things about my parents and their friends, people who had given everything they had to do what they believed God was calling them to do. Sometimes reporters were unkind.

I burned through my willingness to argue the rights and wrongs about how to do church when I was about eleven. I got sick of pastors taking shots at one another publicly when I was about thirteen.

And then the internet came along, and anyone with a laptop can insert themselves into a conversation that isn’t about them, and pretty soon we’re all flinging uninformed opinions around the internet, name-calling and drawing lines in sand, telling ourselves that this is an important conversation.

But is it a conversation? Or is it an easy way to air opinions you never have to back up about real people with real lives and feelings and families?