It’s About Relationships

While going through my morning routine, a comment on one of our sites in the High Calling blog network caught my eye. I’d like to share it with you.

A lost balloon turned out to be a great blessing during a difficult time in our life.

Several years ago, our youngest daughter lost her balloon in a HyVee grocery parking lot. It drifted high and fast, and she sobbed in her car seat as it floated away.

A couple years later, her grandpa died, and she told me: “Mommy, he’s got that balloon that I lost at the grocery store. It was waiting for him in Heaven, and God gave it to him.”

That balloon gave her great comfort as she grieved his death.

Sometimes, it seems, the things we hold tight were meant to fly away for reasons we could never have understood when we first lost them.

Jennifer Lee, a content editor at HighCallingBlogs.com, shared this comment at Katdish.com. It’s in reference to a Billy Coffee post, “The Fear of Letting God.” Billy post is terrific, as is Jennifer’s comment, but what struck me were the connections between us and Jennifer and Billy and Katdish. Those connections are the power of the High Calling blog network. Jennifer is a contributing editor for the site. Billy has served in that capacity in the past. Katdish has been active in the network for some time, and Jennifer wanted to encourage her. That’s one of her primary roles in the network, to go around to people’s sites and show them we are listening. We do this by leaving encouraging comments. I’m certainly thankful for Jennifer’s encouragement. Letting go is a constant in life whether it’s a family issue or a workplace one. We learn to let go so that we may become something more. Clinging to what we have, keeps us stuck. Letting go helps us mature into the life Christ would have us lead. Jennifer’s comment led me to that insight, to Katdish’s blog, and her engaging post. The High Calling blog network is about community building around a shared vision of Christ in an online environment. Currently, the network has more than a thousand blogs addressing different aspects of the high calling of our daily work. Each of the network editors is responsible for welcoming, engaging and featuring the network bloggers. We use Diigo, another social media tool, to keep in touch editor to editor. Our editors highlight their comments around the network and save them to a central group. Everyone in the group receives a summary of the previous day’s comments. Here’s a link to the page I received in my morning email. Jennifer’s comment can be found about midway through the comments. When we finish redesigning our site, it will combine TheHighCalling.org and HighCallingBlogs.com into one site. It’s about relationships, and the network editors do a terrific job of fostering those relationships online. photo "99 Red Balloons" by Aidan Moher, used under a Creative Commons license.