Do you need anything? Are you okay?

I've become a blogaholic. It's true. I spend more time perusing blogs than I have reaching out to my neighbors. Why is that? Is it because I can do it when it's convenient to me? Because I can backspace if something I say seems corny or not exactly eloquent? While multi-tasking the other evening (shoveling down a quick dinner and catching up with the news) I ran across this article. The most important statement I took away was this,

"We've lost the community," said the Rev. Neil Flowers, who plans to talk about Merchant on Sunday at Beulah United Methodist Church, a few miles from where Merchant died. "We do our own thing. We lead busy lives. We go and go and go ... and stay within our comfort zone."

This elderly woman was dead for 18 months in her home and no one even remembered to check on her. I'm certainly not chastizing them for this. It is true. We seem to be living busier lives. Something that has been mindboggling to me for quite a while. Why is it that with the speed and convenience of technology we have available to us today we seem more busy and less capable of being neighborly? Are we so inept at cultivating friendships that we would rather stay tucked beneath the shells of our interior worlds?

Take for instance my next door neighbors. They had been in their home for just about 4 months when a firetruck arrived at their house. The first thing I did was call my mom. She's my other neighbor. Neither of us went over to check on them because we were too concerned to violate their space. We weren't sure if we'd be considered nosy neighbors if we ran to their house. So we waited. My mom finally went over and found that the mom had cut her hand and everything was under control. It was after that incident that we all exchanged numbers just in case.

The firetruck appeared again in the wee hours of the night and this time my husband was home as well. The strobing lights of the firetruck woke him up but again, he counted cars, they were all home and there was no smoke. He thought we should leave them alone. ??? This isn't the way things used to be in a not so distance past. Neighbors reached out to one another. People worried about each other. But we chose to stay within the comfort of our own home and not get involved.

I guess what is so interesting to me is that if you come to the cyber world it seems as if people DO care about one another. In many cases folks they have never met and probably never will. They pour their hearts out to each other and seem to bare their souls. I have no doubt that many of the bloggers out there are genuine. And we reach out. We feel safe. Because we are not exposed in whole but reveal only what we want people to know about us.

I wouldn't give up the people I've met here but I do wonder how on earth I can go back to cultivating the relationships around me so that I can be there for those to whom I could lend more than just a prayer and a kind word.