I love WordPress. Yes, it costs money to use their professionalism to build and expand my website. Yes, it’s worth it. This is what God has me doing for this time in my life; I’m excited about it, focusing the best of my precious energy on it, and consciously make the choice to invest in myself.
That’s the whole point of today’s Quiet Time Musings: investing in me. Making it personal. Keepin’ it real between myself and the One who made me and knows me best.
One of the cool things about WordPress is the amazing amount of information they include on my website dashboard. One of those things is “Comments”. In the configuration I chose and for which I pay, those comments are separated. We have “Comments” from actual readers responding to something I’ve written; and we have mountains of spam.
It’s no shock there’s oodles more spam than there are meaningful comments. Businesses worldwide found long ago they could attach autoresponses to really good stuff on the ‘Net and pull in notice and maybe even business by posing as somebody actually interested in stuff I write.
I don’t blame them for trying.
I am greatly put off by their methods.
There’s no way I’ll copy here the basic format used for autoreplies so you can read it. There isn’t room for it. It’s about three and a third yards long, and includes fill-in-the-blanks, together with suggested words, to make them look and read just like somebody who actually cares what I write.
Cutting to honorable chase.
Ever spam heavensanswer.com?
You know–toss up one of those rushed, all-purpose, fill-in-the-appropriately-spiritual-sounding-words-or-phrases prayers, taking for granted the Holy Spirit will figure it out? He’s God, right? Never gets tired or irritable, doesn’t sleep, on the job 24/7. Can create simply by speaking.
So God should understand how busy and important you are and be tolerant when you send up a 3+-yard-long generic autoreply prayer. After all, the Bible says he knows what you need (as opposed to what you want right then) before you ask. Surely he can sort through each available multiple-choice fill-in-the-blank and come up with an acceptable prayer that gets mighty close to sounding as if it actually came from you. And was sincere!
“Look, I’m pretty sure God understands. He knows I don’t mean nothin’ by it.”
Mm-hmph. Precisely. And He does know it doesn’t mean much.
“No, wait! That wasn’t what. . .”
God understands. . .
- you have the same 24 hours the rest of us do.
- you choose how to fill those hours.
- your devotional quiet time can get just as perfunctory and all-purpose as mine has on occasion. Or his. Or hers.
- you have just as much of personal time with God in your daily life as you want.
— to be continued . . .
© D. Dean Boone, October 2014