I planned to attend a 'chat with the author' session. I entered a room with the topic 'Have a new experience on the internet. Meet Jesus' and found a ministry instead.

My Initiation to Chatrooms

Tercel Goes Chatting

"Chat with the author." Wow, that's interesting. Not only could I run the Visual Basic learning CD and read the manual, but I could listen to the author online. I'd never been interested in chat rooms before, but that was intriguing.

One Sunday afternoon a few days before the chat session was scheduled, I decided to check out the software. After being directed to the mIRC homepage and downloading and setting it up, I began tracing links about IRC to discover how to use this new toy.

I was only planning to visit a chat room long enough to learn how it worked, and once again for the "Chat with the author" session. After all, I had more important things to do than chit-chat on the net. Because of that, it seemed unimportant that I put much consideration into choosing a nick (internet jargon for "nickname"). The only consideration I made was to make certain that no one could tell I was female by the choice of nick. I looked out in the driveway and there sat a Tercel. That would be a good nick, I decided. So "Tercel" was born.

I read an opinion somewhere which led me to believe that DALnet was the poorest choice of the networks. I decided I would try connecting to any network but DALnet. I tried several of them, and could not get my software to connect. Finally I decided to try DALnet. I was able to connect on the first try.

The popup box offered to connect me to a choice of several channels. I opted for the irc newbies channel, and watched with amazement the conversation there. But I didn't offer any contributions of my own. Soon that was boring.

I discovered that by clicking a button I could get a list of all the channels currently in session on DALnet. As I scanned the list, I chose one that appeared to be a general community chat room, but because of the language I only stayed there a few seconds.

"Wonder what would happen if I typed 'Christ' into the search box and searched for channels?," I thought. I tried it. A list of about ten Christian channels popped up, complete with a topical description. The topic of one was, "Have a new experience on the internet. Meet Jesus." I decided to try that one.

CLICK HERE for almost a word for word transcript of my experience there.

If you would like to meet Jesus on the internet, click HERE.