I was going through Joshua Longbrake’s blog. Found this article. Made me stop a second and pause.

“You will most likely never hear about the people who are doing the most good in the world. They probably don’t have a blog. They’re not on Facebook or Twitter. They’re not writing books. They don’t care about marketing themselves, their organization*, their church or their company. They aren’t looking to box up their system in order for others to do the same things they’re doing.

They are too consumed in their community, their neighborhood, their streets, and the people in their immediate proximity to have time for much else.”

I had a friend compliment me about how much I read, blog, tweet and whatnot.

He’s a sucker.

You see, it is all pretty simple and – if I’m doing it right – my system of learning and exposing myself to ideas feels really natural and easy. That is where virtual community becomes a bit faker than real community. All I have to do to appear wise and bright and thoughtful and intelligent is write a couple of paragraphs every day? Find and retweet interesting links? Reword old ideas in new ways? Reference popular books, authors, or thinkers?

Yup, that’s about it.

Online, it is easy to consistently be awesome. In fact, it’s so easy that people who aren’t awesome blow our minds. We’r SO surprised to find a company or church with a lame website. When someone doesn’t understand what blogging or twitter is, we’re at a loss for words. It’s like they’re from a different planet.

Online Awesomeness is low-hanging fruit. It’s the fad diet of achievements. Anyone can do it.

What is a lot harder is to be awesome offline; to continually interact with real people and leave them impressed. It’s hard to learn a difficult skill when you don’t have the time or energy. It’s hard to be kind to jerks. It’s hard to give a rip about people on the other side of the world who will never pay you back for what you do. Those things take years and years and years to master and LOTS of people, companies, churches and societies fail at those. In fact, so many fail to be awesome offline that those who are remarkable (MLK, Mother Teresa, Jesus, Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, etc.) blow our minds for years and years to come.

So here’s a challenge, if you like blogging and tweeting and facebooking. Great.

If you aren’t into it. Great.

Be awesome offline. Be remarkable in reality, not virtual reality.

I’ve decided to stop following a lot of blogs I was following for several reasons.

A main one being that they were self-promoters. They were pastors who just promoted themselves via their blog. I mean, i understand that a lot of blogging is self-centered, but i sense that too many blogs are a revenue stream for pastors.

Now before you get upset, hear this: I have NO problem with monetizing your blog. I just think that – once you attach a price tag to your blog, you’ve compromised your message. I mean – If the message I want to get out is supposed to be “free for everyone” – but I charge people or I try to make money off of it, then I’ve tainted the message.

So yeah, if your blog is a little self promoting scheme to get more people to click your links or sell ads, I stopped following it. (oh yeah, and I stopped following you on twitter, too)

But if your blog/twitter is just a open space for the exchange of ideas, then you’ve got my full attention.

Parents, the video below may make you feel old or like you don’t know what’s going on. Teenagers, the below video will shock you. You’ll realize that the “normal” of today is relatively new. I think this should help bring some clarity…..

[media id=1 width=480 height=360]

[via churchkreatives]