536 VIEWS YESTERDAY-THE FAIRY NUMBER

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter… ©

The counter at blogger claims that yesterday 536 folks read this blog, the post about watching your hands every minute. That is quite remarkable, since my blog posts usually don’t get more than 200 views. Who told 535 friends that they should slouch over to CIW? Were that many people really interested in faith in winter, or did all those folks just want my meat loaf recipe? What is it about watching hands that is so interesting? I suspect it is more about fairy hands, because blogger outsources blog view counting, since only fairies are small enough to fit into the blogger machine, and that the fairy assigned to CIW was not watching her hands and made a slip with her abacus.

536 is a hard act to follow. I have tried all these years to keep my blog views under 535 per day, knowing that more than 535 is the threshold of greed. If the word gets out, that CIW surpasses 535 per day, blogger will have the fairies put ads on the CIW page, for leek soup, and apple sauce, and hands. For that last items, normally you would just go to the second hand store, but past 535, Amazon.com will start selling hands, in case you don’t want to use one of your own to stuff the turduckens they also sell.

The problem and the hope is this: I don’t have control. People can come read CIW or not. Each one is only one, regardless of how many they add up to at the end of the day. They can grasp what I said about faith in winter the way I meant it when I wrote it, or they can get some entirely different meaning from it. Each of us can play only one side of the relationship, just as each of us can play only one side of the net in pickle ball.

Some folks don’t understand that. They both want to say stuff and tell us what we are think about it, how we are to respond to it. They even want to tell us how to feel. “Come on. Don’t be sad. Be happy.”

I have experienced a new type of “both sides of the net” email recently. They are usually of a political screed nature, and at the end, they say: “If you agree, pass this on. If you don’t, then just forget about it.” No, if I don’t agree, I have the right to hit “return” and tell you so, or I have the right to pass it on and add, “This is the stupidest thing I have ever read.” If you send me an email, you have no right to tell me what to do with the “forward” and “reply” buttons.

God says, “I love you.” God does not tell us how we have to respond. The world is a lot messier that way, but there is no real Love if God plays both sides of the net. The good news is that God does not give up, even if we say “No” the first 535 times.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP], where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]

I tweet as yooper1721.