It occurred to me today that the comments section gets mixed reviews.
Get it? It gets mixed reviews. It GETS mixed reviews.
I happen to think that’s one of the funniest things that I’ve ever written.
Anyway…
Imagine walking down the sidewalk in your town and coming upon someone who is dousing themselves with gasoline. As you get closer, it seems more and more obvious to you that they are about to light themselves on fire. At about the moment when you are as close as you are willing to get to this scene, the person sets down the now-mostly-empty canister of gasoline and reaches for the lighter that has been sitting on the sidewalk this whole time.
Would you say something? If so, what would you say?
What if that didn’t go well? What if you were met by an angry torrent of hateful words, cries to ‘mind your own business’ and shouts of ‘it’s my life’? Would you stick with it? If it seemed that your comments were of no interest to this person, would you keep trying?
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Wow, how was that for an opening section, huh?!?! I hit you with a joke and then a major downer. Hopefully, the two evened each other out.
Seriously though, what do we think about comments?
If you’ve never read much of the Bible, let me take a quick moment to suggest that you start with the Book of Proverbs. It’s not overtly ‘evangelical’, and it’s not ‘fire and brimstone’. If you are opposed to the idea of Christianity –maybe because you’ve noticed one or two Christians in your life who would appall Jesus himself– you could still find a lot to like in the Book of Proverbs.
The Book of Proverbs actually has a lot of advice about… advice. One of the things that it says, repeatedly, is that it’s smart to take wise advice.
One of the other things that it says, repeatedly, is that fools don’t follow wise advice.
That example from the opener, that poor unfortunate soul who is going to self-immolate, may or may not be a fool. They may or may not be willing to take the good advice that you might have to offer them as you walk up on them on the sidewalk.
Maybe you’ve had bad experiences giving advice before. I know I have. I’ve offered good advice –wise advice– to people before and they aren’t interested in what I have to say, and so we become a lot less likely to give advice in the future. Maybe there are thousands, or millions, of us who have good advice to give, but we’re just keeping our mouths shut because we’ve been told to do so.
I’ve lost friendships giving advice to people who didn’t want to hear what I had to say. The ends of those relationships are partly my responsibility, I guess; if only I’d kept my mouth shut it those situations, if only I’d minded my own business, I wouldn’t have brought down the house on top of my own head. When I think about those friendships, I have to be honest with myself –> they weren’t really strong relationships in the first place.
I’ve lost some mediocre friendships when I made the mistake of thinking that I could speak truth into a relationship that wasn’t strong enough to bear the weight of that truth. Conversely, I prefer to have friends in my life who will speak truth to me, even when it’s hard for me to hear it. My true friends –my closest friends– will tell me the things that I don’t want to hear and I’ll listen to them because I value their comments in my comment section.
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A little over two weeks ago, I started advertising my posts on Facebook. Prior to that point in time, my daily posts were getting two or three or four views a day. Now, the posts are getting thirty or forty or fifty views a day.
Which is so freakin’ awesome!
The first one hundred days of my daily posts on this blog (from April 21st to July 29th) had a combined total of 710 views (averaging 7.1 views per day). Then, on July 30th, I advertised the post more widely on social media and I got 94 views on just that one day!
In the month of August, on 22 daily posts, I’ve received 965 views (averaging 44 views per day)!
When this first started happening, I was jazzed with all of the views –> jazzed that people were reading my writing. So exciting! I was also excited about the feedback that I was getting, via the comments on social media. And I swore to myself that I was going to try to engage everyone who left a comment with some replies, so people felt like their appreciation was, well, appreciated.
I’ve recently started falling behind on leaving comments and engaging these commenters in some ‘back and forth’. I feel a little guilty about that, actually.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I want everyone to feel free to comment in any way that they feel led to do so. But, it makes me wonder about comments that we receive from other people. Back to my example from the opener, imagine that you aren’t the first person to come upon that person who is thinking about the unthinkable right there in the middle of the sidewalk. Imagine that you are the tenth person –or the fiftieth– to come by with something to say to that individual.
It could start to become a little overwhelming.
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I mentioned, once upon a time, that my favorite Pixar movie is The Incredibles (I talked about it in THIS POST). One of the interesting parts of the movie –and one of the things that I’ve often wondered about– is this: what if people don’t want to be saved?
In the first few minutes of the aforementioned film, one of the superheroes in the movie tried to save someone who was trying to kill themselves. That person ended up suing the superhero that saved him, for “ruining his death”. Because the government was on the hook for covering the legal fees of the superheroes who were just helping the government with protecting the masses, such lawsuits against these superheroes ended up costing the government too much. This sets the stage for the rest of the film, where The Incredibles, and the other superheroes like them, are forced to stop ‘saving people’.
There is an equation here that we need to think about, I believe.
If you are responsible for ‘doing you’, then that might include some inner conviction that you have to give advice to people. In certain situations, you might be wise to offer advice, while in others, you’re being foolish. Nevertheless, your responsibility is to do what you can to try to speak truth into the lives of the people around you.
That’s one part of the equation.
Of course, the other part of the equation is how that advice is received. Inasmuch as we would all love, when we offer advice, if the advice would be received and heeded, that’s not how it works. Furthermore, how other people receive your advice isn’t your responsibility –> it’s there’s. Your responsibility is to ‘do you’.
When I reach that guy, with the gasoline and the lighter, on the sidewalk, I will give him advice. That’s my responsibility. He may take it, or he may reject it.
It Occurred To Me Today 