There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir

by Casey Gerald

So I sat in the glow of Jesus on the Internet, His easy yoke and very light burdens, and chatted for hours, first in the near-endless chat rooms, then over AOL Instant Messenger, until I ventured out into the new cyber landscapes that popped up before social networks were something to make a movie about: CollegeClub, Yahoo Chat, BlackPlanet, and so on. I even broke my first heart on the Internet, when some man from somewhere I don’t remember asked when we were going to meet. I want to see who you are in real life. Um, never. And I never talked to him again, because aside from probably being a murderer, he had outed himself as an old person who missed the whole point of the Internet: Who I was in real life was not important. The only thing that mattered was who I wanted to be at any given moment.