Connections: Guest post by Jonathan Blundell

Jonathan Blundell - JD to his friends – is the first guest blogger on johnnylaird.

He took up the invitation issued here.

If you want to guest blog at johnnylaird.net , I’d love to hear from you.

Now, check out what JD has to say:

I started blogging just over five years ago — April 2005.

Along the way I followed a number of bloggers and picked up a reader here or there for various periods of time.

As I would surf the web for new bloggers to read, I’d keep adding to my RSS reader by finding one blogger, who would eventually point me to another blogger, who would point me to another blogger and so on.

Such is the nature of the web.

Even though I’d read and comment on a number of blogs, I never really made any true connections — that is until I “met” Thomas Matthie (aka Headphonaught).

I found Thomas’ blog through a recommendation from Atari Boy (who’s now blogging at teabass.com), a tech blogger based in London.

His simple recommendation, “Headphonaught’s nanolog – a pretty cool christian blog, which im usually not a fan of, but this one is a good read” was enough to peak my interest.

I dropped in to see what Headphonaught was all about and quickly added him to my RSS reader.

It wasn’t long before I was linking back to his site, commenting on his posts and he was commenting and linking back to my stuff as well.

Finding that we both had similar interests in faith, the future of the church, and community probably made things easier — but I also think it was an intentional part from each of us that made the relationship grow as quickly.

Before long the links started piling up, emails were exchanged, Facebook connections were made, a joint book club was formed on Facebook and the friendship continued to grow.

And once Twitter came along, our friendship grew even stronger.

Suddenly, we were finding out those random things about each other than might not have made it into a blog post.

We were both getting a glimpse into each other’s lives that we couldn’t get without living in close proximity to one another (if then).

And then in the spring of 2008, after listening to a friend’s podcast, I discovered they were building their weekly podcast through the wonders of Skype.

He and his co-host were living in two separate cities and interviewing people from around the country via Skype.

It suddenly occurred to me that while I had not been able to find someone in close (physical) proximity to host a podcast with, the technology was now there to create a podcast with voices from around the world, with little to no cost.

I dropped a couple Tweets to Thomas. A few e-mails were exchanged. Ideas were tossed around and on May 22, 2008, the something beautiful podcast was born.

Now, two years later, we’ve added a third co-host, Stewart Cutler, heard stories from more than 60 folks, launched a free e-book, and continue telling the story of how faith and life intersect daily for our guests.

And these days, Thomas and I are both been fond of saying that while we’ve never actually met in person, we know each other better than our next door neighbors.

Technology has easily bridged an ocean for us — literally and helped spur our friendship on.

And I hope that in the near future we’ll both know my next door neighbors as well as we know each other — because our friendship is a testament to the idea that intentional relationships can grow anywhere — and when they’re properly cared for, they can truly grow into something beautiful.

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Jonathan Blundell is a husband, blogger, author, podcaster and Kingdom Journalist. He digs U2, Fair Trade Coffee, Shiner Beer and Johnny Walker on the rocks. You can find out more about him and his many projects at www.jdblundell.com and follow him on Twitter: @jdblundell.