Please "LIKE" me by Heidi McLaughlin

Impressive. Twenty-six “Likes” in the first seven minutes meant that my post was hitting the mark.  I kept clicking the stats and with each new “like” I experienced a feeling of pleasure.  I must admit the satisfaction of success is a very addictive feeling.

Two years ago I was having a delightful conversation with my daughter Michelle, and with a sparkle in her eyes she said: “Mom I not only love you, I really like you.” Those simple words rocked my world. There is an intrinsic need in all of us to know there is something within us that is likeable.

Over the past year I have been inundated with friends, colleagues, companies and people I’ve never even heard of, asking me to “like” their Facebook page. I am more than happy to “like them but I plead ignorance with regard to the value of this new social media trend. 

I fully comprehend our need to know that our written words have an impact. It is a writer’s greatest passion and fulfillment to know that we are making a concrete difference in people’s lives, breaking down barriers and leaving a substantial difference in this present age. But most of it is now done through social media and here is where my tension lies. “Is our social media obsession and validation more important than human interaction and affirmation?” Writers sit behind their most valuable tool-a computer screen.  I am familiar with this occupation. When I am writing a book or a new Bible Study guide, I become consumed with my computer and technology. I sheepishly confess that there were weekends when I got out of bed, turned on my computer to “write just a few words” and found myself in that same position twelve hours later. 

I mentor an outstanding woman in Virginia who has written the book called THE DIGITIAL INVASION, How Technology is Shaping You and Your Relationships.[i] Her words in this book have caused me to examine the amount of time I spend on my computer, doing research or posting blogs and articles. The author, Sylvia Frejd makes it clear that we are living in a decade of technology that has the potential danger of creating isolation and loneliness.

The past year has been a difficult journey as I struggled to juggle my career, speaking/writing ministry and care for my mother. When I buried my mother on December 6, 2013, I was made acutely aware of the importance of sharing our lives with other people.  How crucial it is to laugh together, share deep intimate stories, examine our passions and dreams, pray for one another and learn to really “like” each other.  I love writing, blogging, sharing posts on Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn. Yet, at the end of the day it is words that we say to each other that will truly impact our existence. Words like:

·         You’re a good mother.

·         I saw what you did back there…that was awesome.

·         How can I help you?

·         I hear you’re going through a hard time. Can I come by and pray with you?

Because of the struggles I experienced this past year, I deliberately and carefully examine how I balance my social media time, and the most important connection on this earth. Eyeball to eyeball human relationships.

I really hope you “like” this post.

Heidi McLaughlin lives in the beautiful vineyards of the Okanagan Valley in Kelowna, British Columbia. She is married to Pastor Jack and they have a wonderful, eclectic blended family of 5 children and 9 grandchildren. When Heidi is not working, she loves to curl up with a great book, or golf and laugh with her husband and special friends. You can reach her at: www.heartconnection.ca

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[i] http://www.amazon.ca/Digital-Invasion-The-Technology-Relationships/dp/0801015294

I Love "Go To Meeting" - Meyer

It’s hard for me to believe that I am still continuing my technology series of blogs. Hard for me to believe, not because there is a dearth of new technology but because I, Dorene Meyer, am embracing it!

Those of you who know me well, know that I cherish the simple life and have an ongoing love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with technology of any kind.

But I gotta say, I do like (maybe love is too strong of a word) “go to meeting.”

Last evening, I participated in the first ever online “Open Mic” session put on by The Word Guild. All I needed was an inexpensive headset and my old desk-top computer, and I was “in” (or should I say “on”?)

One of the exciting things for me, living as I do in a remote northern community, is my annual trek down to Write! Canada www.writecanada.org . There I can renew acquaintances with authors from all over the country and participate in writing events such as workshops, classes, readings and such. Throughout the year, the connection wanes and a feeling of isolation sets in again, especially as I hear of events happening in Winnipeg, Toronto, Halifax, Vancouver…  But for that one hour last evening, it was almost as if I was at Write! Canada again!

The session began with an introduction by the organizers, Les Lindquist (chair of Christian Info Canada) and Paul Oleniuk (2006 winner in the teen category of “God Uses Ink”). This was followed by readings and Q&A by Sara Davison and by Jayne E. Self, two authors shortlisted for the best mystery book award at the Canadian ChristianWriting Awards. I had known ahead of time that these two authors were going to be reading but was in for a surprise when first Marcia Laycock and then Linda Hall gave a reading and had a Q&A.

What was amazing for me was the way that we could all, for that one hour, be communicating and connecting from such diverse parts of the country. Even though I was way up north, I could connect with Jayne and Sara in the south, Marcia in the west, and Linda in the east. For that one hour, technology shrunk our huge country down to a manageable size!

I think The Word Guild is hoping to have more online sessions connecting writers from coast to coast. And for all of you technophobes out there, trust me on this, if I can do it, you can!  And just to prove how inept I am, I’ll confess something I was planning to keep a secret. I was on a “go to meeting” conference with N.J. Lindquist earlier that day. The meeting started okay when I responded to the link she sent me, but for some unfathomable reason, I couldn’t get my microphone or speaker to work, and we finally resorted to conversing over the phone. I was surprised because I had experienced no problems the last time we connected. Well, last evening, I discovered my mistake. In the tangle of wires I have on my desk, I have TWO little green connecting thingamabobs that I plug into my computer: one is for my infrequently used set of speakers and one is for my new set of headphones.  Yeah, you guessed it: I had the wrong little green thingamajig plugged in. Sigh… They really do look the same.

And soon - just thirteen more days! – the real Write! Canada will begin – hope to see you all there!

Dorene Meyer

Award-winning Author of:

Jasmine,  

Lewis, 

Joshua.

I Love Kindle - Meyer

Yesterday, I took another small brave leap into the technological morass which has inundated our culture and forever changed “life as we know it.” (Drum roll, please…)
I downloaded Kindle to my PC.

Though perhaps not such an earthshaking event to some of you, to this northern girl who would love nothing better than a cabin in the bush, heated by wood, and lit by a coal oil lamp… well, you get the picture.

It’s only been around ten years since my husband wrestled pen and paper out of my hands (metaphorically speaking) and insisted that I try writing my books and articles with a computer, storing the information on 3.5 floppy disks. And then came the huge step of “getting on the Internet” which my very patient middle son taught me how to do. I developed a website in 2005, which I still have and another one a couple of years later.

In 2008, I began blogging – on this site! It was difficult for me to do a lot more on the Internet because we only had a low-speed dial-up connection. Then we broke down and got a satellite dish (ugh!) affixed to the side of our house and I was able to Tweet on Twitter post on Facebook and sometimes even watch a youtube video (on the days when our connection is good).

But I am an author and I LOVE books – real books with pages that you can feel. I have books that are over a hundred years old – and I just love the fact that I know this book is still just exactly how it was written – no revisions. You get a real feel for how people thought back then when you read a historical novel that is truly historical!

And don’t we all stare at computer screens too much in our workday without also doing this in our leisure time?

So why did I finally stroll over to the “dark side” and embrace this newest (for me) technological advance? Two reasons really: it’s cheap and it’s convenient. I can get an EBook for a fraction of the price and have it downloaded in seconds to my computer. Living 850+ km from the nearest bookstore, I would normally wait until I made a trip down south to wander through either McNally Robinson  or Aqua books or Hull's Family bookstore . Instead, I can just go on Amazon and download Barbara Ann Derksen’s mystery: Presumed Dead and even write a review on it!   

Did I mention that I was able to download Kindle FREE to my computer?

It’s so easy, even a recovering technophobe like me can do it!

Dorene Meyer

Award-winning Author of EBooks: 

The Little Ones, Jasmine, Lewis and Joshua

Book Review: The Next Story by Tim Challies (Nesdoly)

If you’ve detected some changes in yourself, your kids or grandkids since the coming of the Internet, video games and smart phones, you’ll want to read The Next Story by Ontario author Tim Challies. When this pastor and writer began to notice how his beeping and ringing gizmos and gadgets had him on an ever shorter leash, he decided to do some investigating. The result is a holistic book that not only gives information about technology but also provides a well-researched, well-reasoned and biblically based context for its use.

In Part One Challies lays the groundwork for a discerning utilization of technology by first relating it to God and theology. Next he explains what theorists have discovered about ways it changes society and individuals. Finally he takes us on a tour of digital technology through history, showing us how we got here.

Part Two delves into modern digital technology’s impacts on communication, mediation (use of media instead of face-to-face contact), distractibility, family life, information (e.g. the sheer volume and questionable quality of it), truth/authority (e.g. Wikipedia versus an encyclopedia written by experts), and visibility and privacy.

Throughout Part Two, Challies relates technology’s challenges to the foundational discoveries about spirit, soul and body he arrived at in Part One. Each of these chapters has a “Questions for Reflection” and “Practical Application” section, good for personal or group use.

As someone who has interacted with digital technology for years, I saw my behaviours described often in this book and found myself thinking, “So that’s what’s going on!” Whether you’re a technology newbie, a seasoned digital immigrant, or a digital native, there’s something for you in its pages. Digital technology is here to stay. This book will help you see how you can remain its master instead of allowing it to master you.

Title: The Next Story: Life and Faith After the Digital Explosion
Author: Tim Challies
Publisher: Zondervan, 2011. Hardcover, 208 pages. $21.99
ISBN-10: 0310329035
ISBN-13: 978-0310329039

Review first published in Faith Today - July / August 2011 issue.

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Website: www.violetnesdoly.com

• Personal blog promptings  
• Writerly blog Line upon line 
  
• Daily devotions for children Bible Drive-Thru
• Daily devotions for adults: Other Food: daily devos
• A poem portfolio

Fan of Blogging - Meyer

Hi everyone!

After many years of waiting to get a "round tuit" this is the day! I am going to start my own blog.

It does help considerably that I am now on high-speed Internet. Working with a speed of 53 kb/second was a bit tedious to say the least. Loading up pictures could quite literally take hours.

I still live way up north (850 km north of Winnipeg, MB) but we finally broke down and got a satellite dish affixed to the side of our house.

So the gal who would much much prefer to be writing with pen and paper in a cabin in the bush with a wood stove and kerosene lamps is finally and completely gone high-tech. It's been a long journey. My husband had to practically pry my old typewriter from high school out of my hands and into our yard sale when we moved. I was being hired to be a newspaper editor so buying my own computer seemed almost like a necessity, even to my frugal mind.

When it became absolutely necessary for me to go on the Internet, my long-suffering son showed me more than once (actually a few more times than once!) to send my first email.
Now I google, tweet, facebook, post, link in, upload, download, tag and even, on occasion, poke (although that still seems a bit rude to me).

For those of you who are still waiting for your own "round tuit" do not delay a moment longer. It's easy really. Just go to www.blogger.com. Sign in, using any google account you have (like gmail) or start a google account if you don't have one. Then choose a name, choose a template and start blogging!

Please visit my blog at www.dorenemeyer.blogspot.com

Dorene Meyer
www.dorenemeyer.com

Author of Lewis, Jasmine, The Little Ones and Deep Waters
Now in book stores across Canada
Distributed by Word Alive Press www.wordalivepress.ca.
Available online and as an ebook on Amazon www.amazon.com (key in title of book and publisher: Word Alive Press).

See Computers, See People - Gibson

At high noon on December 28th – or as high as noon gets at the dawn of true winter – I sat in my husband’s big recliner. Plunked myself down, just to stare out the window. Alone for the first time, it seemed, during the holiday season. And very tired.

All was calm, all was bright. Only an occasional breeze nudged the trees. When they stirred, they flashed. Sparked like static between bedsheets.

A light application of hoar frost, barely noticeable, rested on surrounding spruce, maple and cedar. They wore their jewels like self-conscious royalty.

I liked that. Liked the still house, the quiet angels, the surprises over. Blessed residue of Christmas past.

Across a sky as blue as forget-me-nots, a white streak began and lengthened from the west, tracing eastward.

Just a jet, I thought. Wonder where it’s goin’ today.

A jet? the Holy Spirit interrupted. (Never fails. I sit down to be quiet. He interrupts.) A jet, Kathleen? That’s people up there. Human beings thirty-five thousand feet up, travelling 550 miles an hour. People leaving home. People going home. People happy, people sad. Mad people. Afraid people. Confident people. People, Kathleen.

Well, of course, Lord. I know that. So what?

Don’t call it “just a jet,” that’s all. I don’t even see the jet myself. Only people.

Into my silent day, holy day, into my all-is-calm, all-is-bright moment sparked a realization: computers too, are mere people vehicles.

I’m a bit of a Luddite when it comes to the computer. Not in practice — in mindset. I keep my website pages and blogs operational, but I’m slow to plunge deeper. Social marketing scares the bejeebies out of me. I see dangers there — making ourselves in our own image, mostly. Creating our own buzz. Becoming digitalized people. Would Jesus tweet? Honestly, now.

Clouds obscured the blue bowl above, the vapour trail dissipated and the jewels stopped flashing. But there we sat still, God and I. Remembering the people Christ died for and I craft words for. Talking over the messy business of communicating vital life messages using the tenuous mediums of dead trees, broken sticks, podiums, pixels, and 140 characters.

Sometimes I forget you write too, I said. An anthology, sort of, wasn’t it?

Yes, said the Living Word. Bit of time. Bit of effort. Not many read it. I speak some too. Even fewer listen.

I’d rather forget about the blasted computer, mostly, I said, yawning.

I know that, too.

The sun stretched two fingers through a ragged cloud, poked a glaring hole in my neighbour’s blue spruce and pinched shut my weighted eyelids.

That okay, Lord?

Okay. Just remember. People.

Hmm, hmm.

Hey, Kathleen?

Sigh. Now what?

I use computers too.

Tweet.

Kathleen Gibson

Practice by Pratice, a collection of Kathleen's Sunny Side Up faith and life newspaper columns will be published later this year by Word Alive Press, Winnipeg.

In 2009, BPS Books published West Nile Diary, One Couple's Triumph Over a Deadly Disease.

The lost art of letter writing

Recently I read a wonderful memoir by an elderly friend of my mother's: Russia and Beyond: One Family's Journey 1908-1935 by Margaret Zarudny Freeman. It tells an amazing story of her family's survival during the Russian revolution. She was the oldest of six children and wrote with amazing detail how they coped in western Siberia, helped by a couple of loyal servants after their father fled the country to work first in China, then in Japan. While he was away their mother was arrested by the Bolsheviks and later shot.

Here's a description of the book from Amazon:

Russia and Beyond is a young woman's account of herself and her family in
the chaotic years surrounding the Russian Revolution and Civil War of 1917-20,
followed by a long self-exile in Russo-Chinese Manchuria, and the beginnings of
a new life in America in the 1930s. A child's-eye view of violent military
events, and of unflinchingly practical responses to personal emergency and loss
- with five siblings in tow after the death of their politically victimized
mother - matures to an understanding of homeland loyalty, displacement, and
expatriation, in a more international arena. The author, now aged 97, has left
us an inspiring, sometimes chilling, but forever positive narrative of this
harsh intellectual coming of age, and of the mutual love and perseverance that
sustained her, and her young fellow survivors. A comment from Nadine Gordimer
(Nobel Laureate in Literature, 1991): "Dear Margaret, I've read your book with
growing interest and fascination, page after page. It's a remarkable evocation,
a double one: a revelation of the profound meaning of emigration not written
before, and a picture of family relationships enduring the disruptions of
historico-political disasters in what must be no less than a unique survival by
trust and love." Johannesburg, South Africa 10 August 2005

Mrs. Freeman does not spare herself in her portrayal of childhood selfishness, sibling rivalry, and conflict with adults. Her portrait of her father and mother and the servants is the stuff of great literature. One thing that struck me in reading the book was how many letters this family wrote each other. The father wrote as often as he could, even when strife, famine and dislocation made the mails unreliable. He encouraged his children to write him often, and saved the letters. First of all, it amazed me how much family togetherness was stressed no matter what distances separated people. Today, we may live in the same house, but so often everyone's in their own room with their own computer or TV set, often not even having meals together.

Secondly, those letters, saved through periods of unemployment, uncertainty, travel and danger, provided a treasure trove for Mrs. Freeman when she wrote this wonderful memoir.

What's happened to letter writing today? We send emails now, but mostly emails are short, a paragraph or two. And how can we depend on saving them? I have lost my saved email when hard drives have crashed. I have other saved email on hard disks that are soon going to be obsolete on new computers. Many of us have the little portable hard drives that look like squat pens, but who knows how long that electronic format will last.

We are in a period of such rapid technological change that even trying to write a memoir or a novel that specifically mentions a certain kind of technology can either date you pretty fast, or confuse readers. How many teenagers today would know what a floppy disk is? Or an eight-track tape?

I find it hard and cumbersome to write letters. I send the occasional hand written card, but even that is difficult. I am addicted to convenience and have trouble slowing down to write a long, thoughtful, observant letter. What I used to devote to letter writing, I now devote to blogging.

Maybe I have a wider audience in the blogs, but who knows whether 25 years from now, any of what I've written here will be accessible.

We're paying a price for convenience and today I confess my addiction to it. And, this Lenten season, my feeling of contrition makes me aware this addiction is not a good thing. The book also made me realize is that too often I don't take the time to get to know the people I meet. For example, I had met Mrs. Freeman several times over the years and had no idea of her remarkable story.

As we live in our virtual worlds, are we taking time to connect with the real people in our midst?
How alive will our writing be if our main contact is through computers, monitors and appliances? Do you miss the days of letter writing?