The Community of the Blogs

After a very full day of doing things, I slid into the evening with my friend Terry Ball. He is in town for a Georgia Emergency Management Agency (GEMA) meeting where he is the Assistant Director or some such title. We met over 20 years ago when he was in charge of homeless programs for the Georgia Department of Community Affairs (DCA).

He reminded me that the first time we met, as he announced new funding opportunities for the state, that I handed him a cigar.

So I stood out from every other potential applicant. He evidently enjoyed the cigar, for a decade DCA became Union Mission’s largest funding source, and Terry and I have become dear friends.

He drove out to my house on Tybee and we visited on my beloved back deck for a bit before making our way to Marlin Monroe’s for supper. Marlin’s has an outside deck literally in the sand dunes and a nice view of the ocean. It makes for a good setting for good conversation and food.

As soon as we entered the deck we were met by Chela Gutierrez, another long time friend. Now Che is unlike most women. That is an understatement! Her arms are adorned with colorful tattoos from her wrists to her shoulders. She is extremely fit and is a former fire fighter for the City of Savannah. She is a very talented writer who has been published in the Oxford American. She has a wicked sense of humor and in her past would often show up at my house … just because. Whenever she wanted to! Thanksgiving dinner? It didn’t matter she would walk in unannounced and uninvited and take a seat at the table.

She and I also got into a letter writing dual in CONNECT Savannah a decade ago when she referred to “the old men at the Breakfast Club” that she sometimes hangs with. That merited a response which led to her making other wild allegations which led to another well thought out intellectual argument. Finally publisher Jim Morekis saw that readership was plummeting so he stopped publishing us.

Terry and I took our seats and when Che wasn’t joining us between doing her job and actually waiting on customers, we talked into the night. It had been a while since we had actually been together so there was a lot of catching up to do. Terry reads my blogs on a daily basis and was both current at what had been happening in my life and had lots of questions at the same time.

He was very curious about the responses my daily writing generates and asked at one point, “Does it feel like a ministry?”

And he stopped me in my tracks. It does. My ministerial roots are somehow manifesting themselves over the Internet. And lots of people, many whom I know and many who are new friends, chime in to celebrate, laugh, cry or resonate with the things that are going on.

Terry nodded and advised that as I move forward that I understand that one of the by-products of the blogs is “community is born” which is one of the holiest of things. “A lot of us benefit from it,” he said, “just like you are benefited by writing it.”

We finished dinner and took a walk down the beach so that the community was no longer virtual but flesh and blood. A few weeks ago the friends that I went to college with and I did the same thing. After reconnecting on-line, and multiple posts on my blogs, we held a reunion at my house and it was a wonderful magical day of community of love. Today I am having lunch with a special friend that I met because of my daily confessions. Even Che and I read one another’s stuff and we celebrated one another last night because it had been a long time since we had seen one another and we embraced when we did.

I could go on and on. My daily confessions lead to conversations which lead to community. And in increasing doses, the word becomes flesh, and we get together and we laugh and we talk and we hug and we love.