No apologies or lame BS about how I haven’t written lately. Let’s just jump in to a discussion I want to foment.

This past weekend, I had the great, glorious fun of helping shepherd 30 of my Internet friends around Nashville. Ostensibly we were there for Andrew Peterson’s annual Christmas concert—in which he and some of his awesome Nashville musician friends gather to retell the great story of the birth of the Christ child—but truly, we were there for fellowship. Don’t believe me? A number of people—Mark, Katey, Morgan, David, and Susan all come to mind—came for part of the weekend and didn’t even go to the show [all due to scheduling conflicts]. They all drove or flew to Nashville just to … hang out. None of them spent 48 hours in Nashville.

It’s quite amazing to me what has happened to this little community. I have my part in that, because I was the first person nuts enough to say, “Let’s get together for the sake of getting together.” That went well, and a dozen or so gatherings have occurred since—some around shows, some just because we want fellowship.

There’s a large contingent of folks that feel left out of what we just shared together. I have words for them: gather on your own! Here’s all it takes:

• A date.
• A place to stay. It should be as inexpensive as possible; if it isn’t inexpensive, it should be a place where everyone can gather together in order to attenuate the “Man, it sucks that we have to pay to stay here!” factor. On this score, your apartment is not so good, but your local state park with cabins is good.
• An idea of a couple of things to do and a couple of places to go and eat. You don’t have to plan the whole thing out; you just have to give the event some semblance of something to do.

Really, that’s it. We’re all just looking for a reason to get together. The first .net meeting was held here in Huntsville, at the state park atop the mountain on which I live. I rented two cabins for the weekend. You might not can afford that, but if you can mass the credit and have people chip in, it’s not so bad. [They're going to likely pay more for travel anyway.] I pitched it with this idea: UAH had home hockey that weekend. I could score us free tickets. We’d get together, get to know each other, watch some hockey, eat together, stay up late tossing movie quotes back and forth—well, that is if you’re Trey and Chrissy, who quoted So I Married An Axe Murderer for hours on end—and generally have a good time. We went bowling, and we didn’t plan to do so. We planned to go to church together, and we didn’t.

It was a success, and it started the ball rolling.

Since then, I’ve gone to Lynchburg, VA; Memphis, TN; Tuscaloosa, AL [willingly!]; Muscle Shoals, AL; Atlanta, GA; and Nashville, TN to gather with these people. Other gatherings have happened in TX and NC without my presence. [My presence isn't required. If you're waiting on me to attend, you're in trouble!] A CA gathering was attempted, but that’s a big state to gather together.

Other folks have whined about not being involved. They need to suck it up and just get together with the people in their area. That’s what the NC people did—they gathered the bulk of themselves together, had a little fellowship one weekend afternoon, and enjoyed themselves.

This should happen more often. It’s just not that hard to pull off!