A quick look at the clock on the wall tells me that it’s 6:31 p.m. I’m about twelve hours into what has to be one of the most bizarre but meaningful days of my life.
It is the day of the Great Follower Conspiracy.
It started with a simple glance at my blogger account before work this morning, just to see which of the blogs I follow had new posts. Then my eyes just so happened to wander up and to the right, where my own followers are posted. Or rather, were posted. My heart stopped, my mouth dropped opened, and I had a rather funny sensation in my stomach.
I had lost almost half of my followers.
My mind raced:
How can this be? What have I done to make all these people mad at me? Is it the comment thing? It has to be the comment thing. I KNEW I shouldn’t have done that. And now all these people are gone. GONE. All because of me.
The tiny thought that maybe this was something totally different, that maybe this had much less to do with me and much more to do with Blogger, was ignored. That just couldn’t be.
And then I checked my email, which happened to be pretty full of people who were wondering just the same sort of thing I was:
“Have I done something to offend you?”
“I’m sorry for whatever I’ve done.”
“Please continue to stop by…”
Oh. So that’s it.
I spent the better part of my day talking to members of my blogosphere family, trying to sort things out and figure out how and if it could ever be fixed. As of right now, many of my followers are still missing, although I did manage to get a new one, (nice to meet you, Peg!). Where they have gone is anyone’s guess. I’m sure I’m still MIA to a lot of the blogs I follow as well.
Still, as aggravating as all of this is, I think there’s a pretty big lesson being offered for everyone affected.
We all want to be accepted and loved, for who we are, the words we write, and the lives we offer our readers a peek into. There’s nothing in the world wrong with that, either. It’s part of our testimony to a loving God, and a chronicle of what He’s doing both in and around us.
Maybe it’s just for that reason that everyone I’ve spoken with today confessed to having the same first reaction: They don’t like me anymore! It was definitely my reaction. In fact, worrying about the whole thing ruined the first few hours of my morning. Because I thought I had Finding out that it was all an innocent screw up made me feel better for a little while. Then something else started creeping into my mind.
Should I have really been so upset over all of this? What if I really did lose a lot of my readers? I should have taken it as God’s will. Instead, I took it as a catastrophe of epic proportions.
Jennifer Lee said it much better in an email: “How would I react if I lost every last follower? I say that God is ‘enough,’ but is He? In my life, is He REALLY enough?”
That’s a good question. One that I found myself asking a lot lately and today especially. And one that maybe we should all spend some time pondering.
