F2f... or She Doesn't Know What She Missed

I met this girl on the internet.

This teenaged girl.

This teenaged girl in a local high school..

I tried to set up a face to face meeting.

No. I’m not some pervert — not that particular kind of pervert anyhow.

This young lady and I exchanged blog comments and e-mails a time or two because we both collect the same things.

You know how it is about collections.

If you own one of something, anything — say a stuffed kangaroo carrying an umbrella — then you own one.

If you own two of them — say a stuffed kangaroo carrying a green umbrella and one carrying a pink umbrella — then you own a pair.

But, if you happen to own three, then, come Christmas or birthday or whatever, you are marked as a collector and your children, friends and neighbors all know just what gift to give you: another stuffed kangaroo.

You’ll display them on the mantle above the fireplace. Your knickknack shelves groan under their weight. Cute stuffed kangaroos clog your closets. There will be boxes of the varmints under your bed. In the attic. In the guest bedroom. And you can never again park your car in the garage for fear of crushing a kangaroo.

And you can’t get rid of the things.

On every visit Aunt Peg will ask, “Where is that cute kangaroo with the lavender umbrella that I sent you”?

And you’d better be able to produce the thing or you will hurt Aunt Peg’s feelings and she’ll leave her oil well to Cousin Phillip, the creep.

Am I getting a little off the topic here?

OK. So I met this teenage girl on line. We exchanged blog comments about our respective collections. I began my collection back when I was a Boy Scout so I have collected this item for close to 50 years; The young lady began her collection about five years ago, but already she has some prize examples. She is serious about her hobby and gives every indication on her website of wanting to continue it for the rest of her life.

Now, Ginny and I have come to a point in our life where we want to divest our home of clutter. I have stopped buying more doodads to add to my collection; she gave away some of her grotesque ceramic cats.

No single item in my collection is of great value. You could not take any one thing to Antiques Roadshow and garner thousands of dollars. It all comes under the heading of ephemera and is of no monetary value except to another person bitten by the same collector’s quirk.

At various times I have asked each of my children, but not a one of them shows the slightest interest in my collection; it just doesn’t strike their fancy. Someday when they have to clean out the house, I suppose my collection will end up in the dumpster.

No great loss.

My collection has given me pleasure and it does not have to do anything more than that.

But I hate to see it go to waste.

So I decided that I would give the whole 50 year’s accumulation to this teenage girl I’d encountered on line. No charge. No strings attached. The collection has given me pleasure, I’d like to think it will continue to give pleasure.

So I tried to set up a face to face meeting with this girl AND HER PARENTS — got that? AND HER PARENTS — at a well publicized public meeting where I was a guest speaker. My wife would also be there and we’d determine if indeed this girl seemed serious about continuing as a collector. And, if so, we’d make arrangements with her dad about getting a truck and giving her the entire collection.

The girl did not show.

I do not know why.

Maybe she had homework. Or maybe a football game. Or maybe she watched Dancing With the Stars or MTV that night.

She and her folks did not come to the meeting.

Perhaps, with all the publicity you read about stalkers and perverts on the internet, she and her parents were leery of meeting.

When my son Donald first gave me a computer he issued a caveat:

The Internet, where the men are men,
And the women are men,
And the children are FBI agents!

So, you do know that if you ever plan to meet f2f (that’s computer jargon for face to face) someone you only know on line, that you should only meet in a public place (Police Headquarters works) and let someone in your family know when and where and what time you will be back in touch and it doesn’t hurt to have a cell phone and call your contact midway through the meeting with a license tag number or something of the sort.

Anyhow, the girl and her parents did not show up and I’m making other arrangements about the disposal of my collection.

She’ll never know what she missed.

This is really no big deal.

As Ginny says whenever I buy another addition to my collection at a yard sale or thrift store, “One man’s trash is another man’s trash”.

But, I do have a point in all this rambling.

I’ve heard it said that half of success is simply being there when it happens, that the prize goes to the guy who shows up.

The Lord God has gone to great pains (literally) to set up a face to face meeting with each one of us.

He intends to do us good. Incredible good. The Scripture says, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him”.

Yet we are leery.

We avoid Him.

We do not believe.

We’ve heard tale of cults and isms and religious kooks. We hear so much of these warnings — and they are real — that we refuse to listen to the voice in our own heart.

The one that says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good”.

After the fall of Adam and Eve, the Lord God walked in the Garden in the cool of the evening and called, “Adam, where are you?”

That’s the first thing God said about sin.

And He has been searching for man ever since. But we, like Adam, hide in the bushes.

I think the secret to life, salvation and godliness is simply to stop hiding. To let God find us. To show up at that Face to face meeting He’s been inviting us to all our lives.

In spite of all the rumors we’ve heard about a Predator God who will do awful things to us and turn us into religious fanatics, we need to come out of hiding and trust the One who calls us.

Oh, and it doesn’t bother Him at all to meet us in either a private or a public place or for us to let other people know that we intend to meet Him. He even encourages us to let everyone know how the meeting turned out.

But, if we don’t show up…

PS: please do not mail me any stuffed kangaroos. I have plenty. Honest.

And, for Heaven’s sake, no more of those gruesomely cute kitten statues for Ginny. We’re trying to divest here.