It’s been a few weeks since I posted.

Right now I’m on a train, after a day at a trade show in Chicago. Riding the Metra on the 2nd level, I can watch the city drain away, out my window. The snow has turned the yard into a simple striped space.

Today I attended a session on using blogs and podcasts to enhance a university recruitment effort. The challenge, of course, is the danger associated with truth. Institutions like universities or governments or churches or corporations have complex relationships with their constituents. The truth is that every institution has strengths and weaknesses. Like people, they are also inconsistent day to day. But like people, institutions take actions which, when persisted in, become habits and lead to the formation of character.

Recognizing this, colleges are learning to allow the failings and blind spots of the institution to be honestly reported, in order to gain the greater good that flows from allowing the positives to be extolled in a convincing manner by credible (to the reader) authorities. Eyewitness accounts, unadorned and unvarnished, report the banal heroics that recommend a university, along with the sporadic foolishness which reminds folks of its humanness, and authenticates its claim to integrity.

Putting that experience into my own context of trying to understand the mind of a happy God, it seems obvious to me that the human race is growing in precisely the way that God wishes. People, whether Christian or not, are gaining in honesty and humility. They are learning to value their own experiences and knowledge and perspectives, and express themselves freely. That’s a wonderful freedom, and the Word says, “where the spirit of Christ is, there is liberty.” Lack of liberty is a sure sign of a lack of the spirit of Christ.

What makes me excited is that there is more to this blogging/vlogging trend than merely individualism. There is also a perceptible ramping up of the appreciation each person has for others. Contrary opinions, difficult questions, thorny issues. These things are gaining expression, too. Not only as a rant or a critique, but also as a reflection of growing appreciation of the perspectives of others. By listening to others, honoring all men, and testing all things instead of clinging to their previous paradigms people of every religious background are learning what it means to be a child of God and their brother’s keeper.