E-mail.

It is interesting when you communicate to many people only on E-mail.

There are benefits: speed, easier to read typed messages than some handwriting, and so on.

There are also some pitfalls-you don't always have a place or face to associate with the person behind the E-mails. Some helpful people mention their home church if the church supports us but even that has limits. We know of several "First Wesleyan" churches so those people need to clue us in even more by a city or state. Most people don't think to add a church or helpful hint of where or how we should know them. [As we are getting older we need more and more hints-to place people.]

We send out 500 E-mail and over 400 snail mail updates and some of you pass them on to friends and family. We have met several hundred people who have visited on work teams over the last nine years. We met more at ECHO or medical conferences, or a friend of a friend.

E-mail misses the focal clues of accents, voice volume or inflections. Interesting-we have a couple friends that we met and kept up with through E-mail. They are good prayer supporters. If you had asked us to guess their ages-we likely would of placed them in our or maybe our parents age group [for no real reason, just because that is what we would of guessed]. Ha-we then found out that they have great grand kids and are older than our folks.

Pronouncing names correctly-another pit fall of the Internet. Not knowing how to correctly say people's names is an on-going trial of mine. I get laughed at on a regular basis at clinic as I have a lot of trouble calling out the patient's names who are waiting to see me. We also find that people don't know how to say 'Thede', just remember it rhymes with seed.

I think that in heaven we will know everyone's names or at least be able to remember them after meeting only once!