More from Tim Bednar:

Spiritual bloggers gather content from diverse sources (i.e. other blogs, Popdex, New York Times, etc.) and post quickly. They do not attempt to formulate full concepts, but rest in the confidence that their blog entries are works in progress, incomplete and unofficial. We are open almost to the point of promiscuity (or heresy) and uncompromisingly reserve the right to change our mind.

This is SO MUCH like what the Church needs to embody in its communities. In fact, it’s absence is , I believe, a major obstacle to its becoming the kind of community it is called to be. We are are , by nature, and by God’s call, a people who are always being called even as we are “not yet” ; we are unfinished, unprepared, and often feeling it. It reminds me of Jeremiah. “Who am I?” Jeremiah asked, when he began to feel the tug and the call.

Blogs capture and celebrate this “unfinsihed” business quite nicely. The conversations are much like the kind of conversations many of us, I believe, have often dreamed would become much more common than the all-too-rare moments we “stumble upon” despite our best efforts to program ourselves a barrier that stands in the way.

The things we want to say we are often denied the chance. We are rarely asked who we are, what we care about, what we struggle with, what worries us, …..lots of things. In blogs, we get a chance to lay it all out there. We find ourselves feeling often like maybe we aired too much dirty laundry, or that someting we shared might be put on a par with “what we had for breakfast” (the common phrase often used in rants about why blogs are so much fluff and irrelevance)…but the thing is: such is life. Some of our closest friends are often the ones who do a lot of boring stuff, but we wait around and endure whatever it is we endure becuase there are “gems awaiting”; serendipity; and also, there’s something comforting in it all: that they do the same for us (endure the many boring , dull things we say and do, partly becuase they also sense that we, too, return the favor. This is one of the biggest “what are friends for?”

Blogs reveal a lot of the human. They give us an ever ready and open platform to let it all hang out, to inform, to rant, and to reach out.