My last column for the Dutch newspaper Reformatorisch Dagblad (”Reformed Daily”) is now posted online, at http://www.refdag.nl. I have been writing monthly columns for their weekend English-language page for a year and a half, but I decided it was time to take on something new. I have limited time for these regular journalistic assignments, and I have agreed to be a panelist for a new webpage “On Faith,” sponsored by Newsweek and the Washington Post. For this endeavor, a group of us–representing various religious traditions–are sent a question every Monday, and if we choose to answer it (we must do at least one a month), we send our commentary in on Tuesday and it is posted on Wednesday.
I did not answer the question posted December 4, on how to explain one’s celebration of religious holidays to children in a interfaith marriage. But I did enjoy some of the commentaries that others posted. My favorite is Susan Thistlethwaite, president of Chicago Theological Seminary, at http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com. She tells a wonderful Christmas story, that I will simply repeat here with the counsel that it is worth some Advent reflection. Many years ago she was preaching a children’s sermon, and she asked the kids what the difference is between Jesus and Santa Claus. Her son, Billy, four years old at the time, piped up with an answer: “Jesus will forgive you, but Santa Claus never will!”
Those who know me well thought they would never see the day, but indeed it has come: I am launching my own blog.
Now, it wasn’t so long ago that I wouldn’t have known the definition of a blog, much less its purpose. I am always a little behind on these things—and confess that I have to endure more than a little teasing from my son, Dirk, who is certainly more technologically savvy than I.
Yet I cannot ignore the upside of this whole blogging business. I spent a lot of time this summer exploring blogs—take note, I might be reading yours!—and became quite intrigued with the immediacy of this new way of communicating. So here I am, plunging into the adventure myself. It offers an opportunity for me to share with you, my friends and fellow bloggers, the things that are on my heart in “real time,” so to speak.
One thing that has been on my heart lately is space. Along with exploring blogs this summer, I became familiar with MySpace. I did some browsing, and was amazed by the sheer volume of this phenomenon: thousands and thousands of pictures of people supposedly inviting you into their “space.”
When I look at all those pictures, I think about how, in some primordial sense, each of these folks realizes that they are not alone. I think that, at some level, they realize the truth of the Psalmist when he said: “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.” Or in today’s vocabulary, we might say: If I retreat into my own website, my own blog, my own MySpace…there, too, I am in your presence.
As Christians in this MySpace culture, we need to be reminding people that everything we call “my space” is also, in a very profound sense, God’s space. We are inescapably in God’s presence.
Whether it’s on MySpace, in classrooms, or in the workplace, each person we encounter in our day-to-day lives has a God-sized space within their souls. This is a space that can be filled only by a relationship with the one true God.
Richard J. Mouw
