WWJB

It has now been a month since I began Summit to Shore with my first post, "ex nihlio" on January 5, 2009. Initially I had hoped to post daily but that soon became unreasonable. I now hope to post no less than weekly or every ten days.

I entered the blogosphere with some fear and trepidation as well as excitement and enthusiasm. I am no Luddite but neither am I a computer or tech-geek. I have been exploring personally unfamiliar territory with this blog, similar to climbing a peak for the first time or kayaking a body of water I have not been on before. While guidebooks and maps help in the backcountry and on the water, they are no substitute for experience. Reading about blogging is not the same thing as actually doing it. My learning curve has been steep. Socrates professed that the one who was wise was the one who knew he or she knew nothing. In the past month I have learned how much I do not know about blogging.

Many years ago when I was in high school I took a semester long computer programming class in which we learned how to program in BASIC, even though the school did not have a computer! The teacher graded our programs by hand. In college I took another BASIC programming class and actually had the opportunity to type in my programs and see them run or crash. More worked than crashed.

I managed to get through college and two thirds of seminary with nothing more than a manual typewriter. Between my second and third year of seminary, while I was serving as student pastor of a small rural church and preaching every Sunday, I bought my first computer. It was a Commodore 64. Using a text-editor called Totl Text (written in BASIC), a Smith Corona Ultrasonic electronic typewriter as a printer, and Commodore’s cassette tape drive as a storage device, I began writing my sermons using a computer. A few years later I upgraded to a commodore 128.

It was not until the early 90’s that the small church I then served obtained a used PC running Windows 3.0. I was glad to say goodbye to the text editor and begin using a real word processor, Microsoft Works, complete with diskettes. Eventually I bought my own used portable IBM P70 Laptop and an HP Printer. I later downsized and upgraded to a used Toshiba Satellite still running windows 3.0. These two machines basically saw me through most of my D.Min.

Around 2002 I upgraded to a Dell Inspiron 8200 running Windows 98. For the past year I have been writing on a Dell Inspiron 1420 running Windows Vista. I am sold on Dell and have had no problems with Vista.

When I was in high school no one had heard of a "Personal computer" and Al Gore had not yet invented the Internet. "Blogging" was not even a word. How far we have come. How far I have come. But on January 5, 2009 I started blogging. In the past ten days there have been 163 visits to Summit to Shore with 379 page views from 20 states. I have no idea if that is good or bad for a new blog, but those are the facts. I wonder how long it will take to log at least one visit from all fifty states and when I will log my first international visit. I will let you know with trumpets and fanfare when those milestones occur.

If any or all of the four evangelists had access to a PC (or Mac) rather than pen and parchment, would it have made any difference in what and how they composed their gospels? Imagine Mark including a hypertext link to something John the Baptizer might have written, or Matthew imbedding a hot link to some Messianic prophecy in the Jewish Scriptures. Maybe Luke would have attached an MP3 file so readers could hear the Magnifacat or Benedictus. Maybe John would have added an image from the Hubble Space Telescope to illustrate his Prologue. Imagine a spell and grammar checker correcting all the “mistakes”. I wonder if the writers of the Synoptic Gospels would have opted for a PC while John opted for a Mac?

I am no Gospel writer, but I am enjoying posting to Summit to Shore. For the time being I have not only committed myself to posting every week to ten days but also to generally posting nothing but original photographs I have taken with my Sealife Eco Shot waterproof camera. No borrowing images and then posting images downloaded from the web for me. Everything you have seen here so far has been original and I generally plan to keep it that way.

As far as we know Jesus never wrote a single word other than a few characters in the dirt with his finger (John 8:6). What if Jesus had had access to a computer and the World Wide Web? Would he have prepared his sermons for his home town synagogue and other synagogues (Luke 4:17-44) using his computer? Would he have worked through several drafts of his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) or the Plain (Luke 20) before preaching it? If he had a blog , what would Jesus blog?