A message for each writers and readers:
To Writers
As I write about internet ethics and platform building, here is what I pray you may understand: that follower number, subscriber number, video-views number—it’s not actually a number. Those are individual persons. Each of the numerals that make up that total you’re chasing after represent souls that woke up this morning and entered into the broken and beautiful fray of their lives and come to the spaces you cultivate with their own hurts, longings, desires, and hopes.
What a privilege it is to get to honor and care for each of those souls.
May that not be forgotten. These are not metrics in a pretend audience to applaud your accomplishments or laud your glories. These are people who bear both glory and brokenness themselves.
May we tread carefully and prayerfully into these spaces, knowing that the people who read them matter. May this drive us to our knees and deeper into the word and prayer as the stewardship of such group is, in fact, a form of pastoral care.
May those given audiences to steward recognize the responsibility and the gift it is to offer our loaves and fishes in the form of words and messages. We are not able to make them feed a crowd—that is only Christ. May we honor the miracle and privilege that is.
To Readers
May you recognize when you are being treated as just a number and walk away from the discounting of your humanity. May you instead find writers, storytellers, and speakers who recognize the wonder that it is to get to care for you. May you read words in these spaces that build you up, free you, awaken you to the reality of kingdom life, and make you more fit to steward the care of souls to which you yourself have been called.
I’m honored that you are here and I pray we are challenged to see and love the souls that lie at the other end of these photos and comments, likes and follows. Thank you for bringing yourself to these spaces and seeing me here too.
