The Internet is such a strange place. You click a link and find yourself introduced to someone’s life that you weren’t prepared to enter into. You make a decision…do you read on, cry, and feel your heart break in empathy, or do you click away from someone’s heartbreaking reality and spare yourself the pain of remembering that mothers suffer…babies die…happily ever afters sometimes never come.

Reading someone’s blog lets you enter into their life. It allows you to get to know a stranger’s intimate thoughts…their hopes and dreams…their fears…and sometimes what they had for breakfast. Some bloggers are funny. Some are sweet. Some blog to keep track of their family’s memories, and some blog to share their journey with anonymous online readers who might champion their cause and remember them in their prayers.

Reading blogs can be a very tumultuous experience. I have followed someone’s blog that was focused on their adoption process. I read as they brought two beautiful Haitian children home to join their family, and then recoiled in horror when I checked in a few days later to read that one of their birth children had been terribly burned in a cooking accident. I’ve unsuspectingly visited a mommy blogger’s blog to find a message posted by the blogger’s sister-in-law saying that she had passed away during a c-section, leaving behind a husband, a newborn baby, and six older children. You expect one thing, and you get a large dose of real life instead. In the last couple of months, I’ve cried many tears over the deaths of three different babies. I’ve read their parents’ blogs, and I’ve cried heartbreaking tears of empathy. Sometimes, it’s nearly too much.

It’s a strange place, this Internet world. I follow their stories. I smile at their children’s antics, and cry when their mothers die. I sometimes turn blogging friends into real life friends. Sometimes, reading each other’s blogs turns into phone calls turns into visits turns into best friends. Sometimes, it’s just too much to bear a stranger’s pain as well as mine, and I say a prayer and click away.

It’s a strange place, where you have the right and freedom to choose to care or to look away.

It’s a strange place.