Internet in Heaven?

When Samuel Johnson (noted 18th century Anglican, writer of the first English dictionary, etc.) lost his wife, he took great comfort in the idea that the dead may be able to watch over the affairs of the living. In The Lion King, Simba got to see his dead father Mufasa watching over him from the clouds. It is only natural that we wish to have some kind of contact with friends or family who have departed this earth. This is a touching sentiment, and I respect it.

However, I would like to point out that bloggers have even more reason to hope that this kind of contact is possible. It means the possibility of more readers! Suppose you have a blog in which no one comments. "No big deal," you say to yourself. "My blog entries offer such a definitive word that there is nothing to say." Curious if people are checking your blog but not leaving comments, you decide to set up a hit counter and discover you aren't even getting hits! Now as far as I know, there is no way that someone can visit a website without setting off a hit counter, once it's been set up. Unless the person is using an ip address from heaven! I sincerely doubt that even the most advanced tracking cookie technology has a prayer (no pun intended) of registering such hits. Perhaps there's even a heaven comment box that only people from heaven can see!

Internet in heaven would also be advantageous for the earthly blogger because there's not a need for advertising or marketing. Here on earth, there's all this pressure about "With whom will I network?" and "What niche do I fill?" and "how do I inform people of my existence?" I don't think you have to worry about that sort of stuff for heavenly readers. Presumably, a blogger doesn't have to network with bloggers who are popular in the heavenly blogosphere. (Side note: what if heaven's not a sphere at all? What will it be called?) Probably one of the benefits of the heavenly denizen is that the person gets to talk God and He talks back audibly. Plus, He is omniscient. So in an ideal world, someone in heaven asks God, "Are there any blogs out there I'd like?" and God points them right to you.

I don't want to be presumptuous about what takes place in heaven; if Jesus had not said otherwise, I would have presumed there was still marriage there. Perhaps it is foolish to think that there is still an internet connection there, as well. But as I wrap up this month's pledge drive and the crass quantification of readers and comments, it seems fitting to depart from earth's petty materialism to ponder heaven ... from an earthly, petty, materialistic standpoint. It's probably impossible while here not to describe heaven in earthly terms: its streets are paved with gold, after all (take that, money is the root of all kinds of evil!), and we store up "treasures" in heaven. We use earthly language and material terms to describe the ineffably sublime. So even if we don't have internet readers from heaven, it's appropriate to think that we are blogging, not for the good of this world, but for the next. There are kindred spirits out there with whom we will spend eternity, and there's no harm in thinking that one day, we can exchange heavenly blog feeds with them.