New York has the Old Gray Lady. Now PodFly has the old gray haired lady. Well…. maybe just starting to turn gray, I can thank my four children for that. At 43 I feel like the oldster of the tech/net blogging bunch, but I have to say that I love the whole idea of the net. My husband is the Luddite of the family. He would much rather have his gum scraped than have anything to do with tech. But me, I want everything: cell phone, blackberry, you name it! I find the whole idea of technology to be both fascinating and fantastic.

Having four children I have spent much of my adult life in some stage of sleep depravation: feeding babies, walking the floor with sick children in arm, or being up when mischief was a foot. In all those hours I found the ‘net. When the computer first came into our home in the late 80’s the ‘net was not what it is like now but it was wonderful. To think that you find someone who had interests the same as your own hundreds, thousands of miles away was exciting and I loved it. It was like having a global pen pal. In the beginning I reserved the use of the ‘net to gossiping about a favorite show and thought nothing much about it. That was until I graduated and became a Spiritual Director. If you have no idea what that is or what a Spiritual Director does, don’t worry you are not alone.

Unless you have been on a retreat, was or are considering becoming a religious in the Catholic Church or working in ministry you may never encounter a Spiritual Director, until now: until me! At graduation I announced that I wanted to the “Oprah Winfrey of Spiritual Directors.” I graduated in 1998 and saw the potential of the web and web pages right away. So, I plopped myself down in front of my computer and Googled away looking for web pages of other Spiritual Director and as was shocked by many of them: static poorly written things, sad orphaned pages waiting in cyber space for someone to stumble by; others which where well written and easy to navigate, but had no life; still some where dynamic but were missing something.

There was, and still is today, very little interaction with visitors. How is anyone supposed to get an idea of what your ministry is about if you have nothing that reflects its true flavor? Here is where the newest of all the net’s crazes comes in very handily: the podcast. If you don’t believe that you “sell” yourself in every interaction with very relationship then think again. We are always looking at each other in terms of what can we do in this interaction that will benefit us both. The same should be true with websites especially if they have a service, in my case and other Spiritual Director’s cases, a ministry to “sell”. If you want people to understand who you are and how you are then just having a static site no matter how pretty does nothing to convince someone to come to you. People want to have solution, relationships, they don’t want to be preached to or corrected, and they want to be given the opportunity and guidance so they can help themselves. Podcasts, especially those that are a story with a moral, solution or insight driven will give people the inspiration and guidance they need. Think of Dr. Phil and how popular his show is. It’s not just the spectacle but also the triumph that keep people turning in.

There is nothing more powerful than the human voice. The power of the pen may be mightier than the sword but the power of the voice can convey a depth of emotion that words will never be able to truly touch. Stephen King on paper is scary but in the movies: Forget about it! Podcasts have an intimacy about them that can reach you. And good podcasts can really touch us.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 20th, 2005 at 9:37 am by Patricia-Ann Constance-Wilson Perkowski and is filed under Guest Articles. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.