Thank You Peter Black - by Rose McCormick Brandon

                 (Peter and his sweetheart, May)

Once in a while, a person comes along who reaches out in all directions to encourage others.

We, at The Word Guild, have found such a friend in you, our dear PETER BLACK.

You never fail to write thoughtful comments about our blog posts, comments that inspire us to keep our fingers clicking away at our keyboards.

Thank you for continually reminding us to "Raise our Gaze," to look up because our true and best help comes from the Lord.

When it comes to blogger comments, yours are treasures.

When Kathleen wrote, Breaking Sugar, you said, "Thanks for sharing this candid candy episode. The sweet thing is how your friend was a help to you and through you a whole sugar-lovin' community got stirred up enough to overcome."

To me, you wrote, "Thank you for sharing this heartwarming story of triumph and courage springing forth from tragedy and evil." (The story was about Alice Herz Somme.)

Comments like these require well-functioning little gray cells. Your gray cells have been active on behalf of all who write for Canadian Writers who are Christian.

You bless us with your well-chosen words:

·        i-words like informative, instructive, intriguing, insightful, invested

·        p-words like panoramic, pointed, personal, perspective, parallel, prodigality (where did that one come from?)

·        c-words like candour, courage, compelling        

·        s-words like salient, sublime

On your birthday, we want to bless you with these two words – THANK YOU!

It’s taken us too long to say these words, but our lateness makes them no less sincere. From our hearts, we appreciate you.

You make our writing world a better place.

May your little gray cells generate many more words, not only in your comments to us but in your own books and articles.

May the Lord chase you down and heap blessings on your head!

 

Sending YOU a big group birthday hug. From all of us at TWG!

Blog comments - Nesdoly

In our new reality of feedback on newspaper articles and comments on blogs, we all welcome interaction — or do we? I have, in the last while, activated comment moderation (an option which lets me view the comment first before deciding whether or not to publish it) on several of the blogs I write. That's because though comments can be a great way to get to know readers and interact with them, they can also work against you and your blog.

There are three types of comments I've encountered lately that I haven't published:

1. Comments in foreign languages
Someone routinely posts comments in Chinese characters to my mural blog. I've been able to translate some of these: they're usually harmless sayings or proverbs. However, I don't have the time to sleuth out what language they're in, or what they say. So I've posted a comment policy directly under the blog's banner to the effect that foreign language comments won't be published. (However, they keep coming anyway; maybe they're posted by a bot)

2. Comments with links
If someone I know has linked a relevant article, definition or some such in a comment, I will publish with no second thought. But often the links within or following comments are pure advertising, lead to questionable sites, or may even whisk one away  to malicious places (who knows... I refuse to click on them and neither do I want my readers to fall into any traps). Of course I'm not talking signature/name links created when you sign in to Google etc. to access the comment feature.

3. Comments that work against the purpose of the blog
This last category is tricky. As an example, I got a comment on Bible Drive-Thru the other day. It was in response to this post about tithing. Here's what the commenter said:

"The tithe was NOT a tenth of everything the people owned. God defined His tithe in Leviticus 27:30-33 to be a tenth of the crops and animals in herds and flocks. NO other animals were tithed on.


The poor did NOT tithe. Every TENTH animal was tithed. IF they only had nine new-born animals that year, there was NO tithe.


The poor actually RECEIVED from the tithe. The three-year tithe was FOR THE POOR.


Wage earners did not tithe. Jesus did not tithe. Paul did not tithe. Peter did not tithe. ONLY Israelite farmers could tithe.


The New Testament teaches generous, sacrificial giving, from the heart, according to our means. For some, $1 might be a sacrifice, while for others, even giving 50% of their income might not induce a sacrifice. In the Old Testament, ONLY the farmers tithed, and it was equal percentage (a tenth). The New Testament teaches the principle of equal sacrifice instead of equal percentage. Equal sacrifice is much harder to achieve, if not impossible, than giving ten percent."

To his credit, the commenter's posted name was linked to a website so I was able to check him out. I found that he was a financial adviser who considered himself an expert on tithing — in fact claimed to have special Holy Spirit teaching on the subject.

What to do? His first point was well taken. As I reread my post, I realized one of my statements was probably not defensible. So I changed it. (I had first written: "The tithe was one tenth of everything the people owned." I changed it to: "A tithe is one tenth.")

Otherwise:
- His tone was chippy (note the words in caps).
- His ideas were somewhat controversial (at least to me).
- I sensed that because he considered himself an expert, dialogue would probably not be possible.

What tipped my decision to not publish his comment, though, was the fact that Bible Drive-Thru is a blog for children. I felt I could defend my post as orthodox the way it stood (though perhaps not to his satisfaction), and I didn't want this blog to become the scene of an adult theological argument. (Had I received such a comment on an adult-reader blog, I most likely would have published it.)

Did I make the right decision? What are your comment denial criteria? Do you have a comment policy page posted on your blog? Does it help?

*********************


Website: www.violetnesdoly.com

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