stoma pros stoma

It's a good email...

Hello Mike,  

Please, allow me to remind you: "Haver" British usage: "to hem and haw." Scottish: "to maunder, to talk foolishly, to chatter, talk nonsense, to babble." Jewish: "a friend, chum, mate" - specifically someone willing to partner with you in grappling with truth and Word and life. Yep, I'm setting a high bar here... " I confess, out of everyone you were the man I felt I could speak to and talk with about hard sayings. Today, I must attest to the continued un-soundness I see in your reasoning at your blog. I am amazed at your gross errors as well as your refusal to engage others in debate about what you yourself have publically said. I am wondering why you never answer anyone on your blog who has challenged your words (like Concerned Citizen) or themselves made gross doctrinal errors(like Val). After all you are a pastor......aren't you?

It’s a good email from someone I won’t name, someone who knows where I am, has the number, is probably no more than a fifteen minute drive away, if that, but who has refused thus far to come over and allow a face-to-face discussion and exchange to take place – and I’m offering to buy him a cup of coffee, no less!

But it’s a great email.

It points out the context in which cyperspace interaction ultimately has to connect if it’s to be healthy. When blogging and Facebooking and emailing is done in the context of face-to-face relationship and exchanges, it can be healthy and add to those growing relationships and to a mutually shared journey of truth and faith.

Without it, it can degenerate into little more than anonymous sniping behind screen names and avatars.

It’s a great email because it offers a wonderful opportunity for truly defining this fine art of “havering.”

Havering – chattering and babbling and grappling with truth – is ultimately and ideally intended for a face-to-face setting between people who love God and truth and each other enough to actually take time to see one another and then really hear one another, thus providing the opportunity to learn from one another.

What I love about blogging this past year is the number of face-to-face conversations and discussions it has stimulated and occasioned. Conversations digging into the Word, give-and-take, iron-sharpening-iron type of conversations. What has been the greatest challenge for me has been monitoring comments. I just haven’t been able too. Some of my face-to-face conversations have referenced online conversations in the comments – which has been cool to hear about! I love that people are interacting there, but my involvement in three weekly small groups and daily conversations in the bookstore or at Starbucks (or wherever) leave me little margins for hunting for conversations among online comments that are often by anonymous people who don’t identify themselves. Whatever works for them – but I think I’ll keep choosing to invest in the face-to-face interactions – and in time actually reading the Bible and communing with the Father! For me it literally comes down to that choice.

So do I set up the blog without comments? I could figure out how to remove that feature, I suppose, but evidently some do enjoy grappling there, so I suppose I’ll leave it as is for the time being and risk the accusations of not caring about God and truth. Accusation is bad havering anyway. I suppose that’s why the enemy of all our souls is called the Accuser! Christ in us calls us higher and deeper.

So no, don’t expect me to frequent the comments. If you are commenting there to get a rise out of me or to correct me, you best email me (mike.freeman@vineyardboise.org) and then we can see about pursuing further conversation – which would hopefully be face to face if possible – and I’m buying the coffee! I feel no need to monitor the comments for gross errors – others are evidently doing that plenty already, and I’ll leave that business in their most capable hands – and in the hands of the Holy Spirit!

I will continue to choose the better part.

Stoma pros stoma.

That’s what the apostle John calls it. It literally means “mouth to mouth,” but we usually translate it in "paraphrases passing for Scripture these days" face to face.

The two shortest letters in the New Testament, in fact, the two shortest books in the entire Bible, were written by John the Beloved who made a quick end of those letters with the sentiment along these lines: “Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face (stoma pros stoma), so that our joy may be complete.”

Now there’s an attitude and heart to download!

About half the New Testament (actually, the half I’ve memorized over the past 30 years) is letters (wish I’d chosen the Gospels instead back in the late 70’s!). Letters that were written, for the most part, because Paul or Peter or James or John or whoever couldn’t be there in person. They wished they could be – witness Paul’s angst over the Galatians: “Brothers, how I wish I could be present with you now and change my tone, because I am perplexed about you!”

Writing such letters was a necessity due to the writer’s physical absence – but the writing was nearly always preceded and followed up by personal, face-to-face interaction and fellowship.

To settle for anything less – or worse, to choose pen and ink or keyboard and comments – over face-to-face interaction is not only bad form and bad havering.

It is perhaps the grossest error of all.