Praying With Twitter Through The Storm

I’ve never been able to get the point of Twitter.  It’s like trying to read a bowl of alphabet soup.  It may contain all the letters of your favorite poem but good luck trying to decipher it. 

I find Twitter is like that.  A bunch of strangers floating random scraps of their lives in cyber soup.  Marketers flogging some product or service you wouldn’t want in a million years.  Angry people perfecting their ability to be obnoxious in 140 characters (including spaces) or less.

Occasionally, I saw some of Twitter’s potential.  Baseball games are kind of fun when you hashtag your team.  It’s a little like sitting in the stands...way, way out in the bleachers.  All that’s missing is someone selling beer at outrageous prices and someone else spilling it on you.

The same with the presidential debates.  Although it’s very distracting, watching split screen TV and a Twitter feed all at once.  Until someone fact checks a statement on Twitter and refutes it in real time, which seemed to happen quite a lot to Mr Romney.  His forte was definitely staring intently, and a wearing a really big flag pin. 

A great book called Click 2 Save, The Digital Ministry Bible, helped me realize more of Twitter’s potential.  It’s written by a Lutheran pastor, Keith Anderson, and a college professor, Elizabeth Drescher, whose collaboration (they met on the Internet through social media) is itself a testament of how technology and social media is changing our world, bringing people together.  If you’re looking to understand social media in a hands on way, especially its implications for ministry, this is definitely a great place to start. 

Keith Anderson coined the term, “Twitter chaplain.”   You don’t stop being a pastor when you go online, he realized.  When the Massachusetts town where he served experienced a crisis, people communicated updates on Twitter, and he tweeted prayers.    It was a powerful way to bring the presence of God to a frightening situation. 

I thought of that this week, listening to Hurricane Sandy howl in the night and the rain slash against the living room windows.  I was on Twitter following #Sandy, expecting the lights to go out at any moment (they never did).   A flow of tweets was streaming as furiously as the rain outside.  There was awe, bravado, profanity, sarcasm, and fear. 

I began to read prayerfully.  Allowing the flow of information to settle in me and crystallize.  I "tweeted" a simple prayer for those who were frightened and facing the storm alone.  The prayer was immediately “re-tweeted.”  I offered others.  A couple more re-tweets. 

It’s hard to say what impact those prayers had in the lives of others.  That’s always hard to know though.  What is undeniable is the effect this practice had on me.  Using Twitter time as prayer time and part of my devotion, connected my prayer life to the real time needs of the world.  Gave it substance and form.

Praying the Twitter feed has become part of my routine.  It’s a model for engagement, an antidote to self-centeredness, and a means for God’s presence to break into the world.  And spending time on Twitter is a powerful reminder of how much there is to pray about.