Online Ministry

The following is an except (slightly modified) from one man's blog I read. I don't know him. I found it and added it to my reader because I found the things he shared to be both funny and poignant.

Often, it feels like God calls us to do something for Him and we do, and it's like a note we put into a bottle and then promptly throw into the ocean of life.

That guy at work He calls us to reach out to switches jobs and we never hear from him again.

The neighbor we walk through a divorce moves to another town and disappears.

Our prayers for people line the shore like a thousand bottles floating away from us without resolution or closure.

But sometimes they come back to us. Sometimes, God blesses us with the gift of knowing exactly how He used what we do for Him. And that can be a very beautiful thing.

The other night, I shared a story my counselor had told me on my site, 97secondswithgod.com. It was a short story about how God loves when we wrestle with Him because it's impossible to wrestle with someone far away. We feel guilty about it, because we think we should trust instead of wrestle but He sees it as a sign of intimacy.

Here is what a reader said on my site in response:

Jon,

My wife has stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, and it looks like she's entering the beginning of the end. As you might imagine, I've been wrestling with God quite a bit lately.

When I read your words just now I broke down and cried because the guilt, frustration, fear and anger were instantly replaced by the image of a loving God.

Thank you so much.

God is weird. A man I've never met, in Oregon, a state I've never been to, dealing with a disease I've never dealt with, got the bottle he needed. I threw it out into the
ocean and God sent it across the country.

This is the strength of online ministry. God's truth is truth whether shared in person or online. You can read something life-changing in a book or on a web site. God can speak to you through anything.

This is why I think it's important to use the Internet to reach people. We take God where the people are. They are online.