Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Telling The Story

These days there are lost of ways that missionaries can share with people both in their own home countries, the country where they serve, and around the world.  This blog is one obvious example.  To see how far-reaching this medium is, just scroll down and look at the left-hand column.  You'll see a map of the world, with red dots representing places from which people have seen this blog.  Pretty amazing!

Then look at the upper left-hand corner of the page.  Do you see that box with the Facebook logo and a picture of Judy and me?  That's something new in just the last couple of days.  It's a link to our page on Facebook.  Please notice that a page is different than a personal profile.  Ever since Judy and I joined Facebook, we've used our profiles to tell about our mission work.  Lots and lots of people have become our friends on Facebook primarily to find out about our work.  We don't really know them in person.  They may or may not be interested in stories about our nephews and nieces, or pictures of our grandson (unlikely as that seems!)  Now we're trying to make the profiles truly personal, and to use the page to share about missions.


The page is almost purely about our work and the country and people of Papua New Guinea.  It would have caused less confusion if we had given the page a catchy name like "Andy and Judy the Missionaries" or "Our PNG Adventure" or something.  But alas, we gave it the name "Andy and Judy Bennett", and many people have trouble distinguishing it from "Andy Bennett" and "Judy Bennett", our personal profiles.  Sorry.  I'm planning on looking into changing the name, if that wouldn't cause even more confusion.

Facebook and blogs are very different.  I've worked to make the blog nice in appearance, and have added "extras" in the side bar, like links to other missionaries' blogs, church and mission web pages, a search bar, and of course now a link to our Facebook page.  I try to keep stories on the blog short, but I consistently fail.  Facebook is much more suitable to the quick info bite.

Here's my plan.  I'm going to do both, as long as it isn't too time consuming and difficult.  The longer, more detailed stories will be here, along with a few pictures to keep it a little more interesting.  Facebook will have the shorter, quicker stories, and albums of photos, links to interesting sites, etc.  I'd urge you all to look at both from time to time.

If you are not a fan of our Facebook page, please just click on that Facebook box in the upper left-hand corner of this blog.  After that, you will get little items in your news feed about posts on the page.  Of course, you can also just visit the page from time to time.
AB

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