Practice what you Tweet

In a world of Facebook status updates and 160 character one-liners, it’s easy for us to drift further and further into an electronic personality and identity void of authenticity. The question is does our Facebook and Twitter identities match who we actually are? More and more people are rejecting the rewards of interacting with people to venting every issue and belief via the World Wide Web. Upset spouses argue via their status updates, friends take shots at each other in 160 characters, in-laws use the term ‘people’ to describe everything they hate about the spouse of their son or daughter, with one click the whole world knows that you’re either single, interested or in a ‘complicated’ situation and yes preachers rebuke members they’re upset with via their status update. Comments like “i’m glad the TRUE worshippers showed up today”, when in reality he’s (the pastor) mad because the church wasn’t as packed as he believed he deserved. The list goes on and on about how passive-aggression is somehow becoming applauded and almost encouraged in our culture. The question that I believe must be asked is what’s the danger in all this?

The End of Confrontation

Facebook and Twitter has created an outlet for people that don’t want to confront people nor confront themselves. Behind a computer passive people suddenly become aggressive experts on humanity to offer advice that they rarely apply themselves. Matthew 18 clearly spells out how we’re to address those that have offended or sinned against us, but many and I would say most avoid God process for a point, click and type response. The surprising thing about this is that we judge others by their actions and want to be judge by our intentions. Our Facebook and Twitter identities matter more to us than who we really. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of social networking, but most aren’t using it for social networking they’re using it for therapy, counseling, intervention and even sermons. We must understand that there is consecration in confrontation and to avoid these conversations with actual human beings in favor of ‘electronic venting’ creates a culture of people that are shallow and will never experience authentic relationships.

There’s Hope

The end result of this evasion of confrontation and embracing the ‘e-relaity’ is that we’ll become more obsessed with how many retweets and likes we get verses actually being the people God has called us to be. We become great dads on Twitter, but too busy to listen to our children because our heads are glued to our phones seeing who looked at our pictures and reposted our updates. We’ll put up post on missions without actually engaging people with the gospel and we’ll be great spouses on the web, but terrible ones in person. Let me be clear, I’m not against announcing daddy daughter dates, concerts, night-outs, church gatherings, etc. via Facebook and Twitter, but I think it’s important not to substitute our ‘e-relationships’ with the real one that we’re presented with daily in our co-workers, spouses, children, church family and relatives. The good news is there’s hope for all of us and YES, I’m including myself. Christ has secured a new, REAL reality of holiness and missionality on the cross. He’s secured what we never could secure for ourselves and in Him we no longer need to seek approval and identity in our ‘Likes’, ‘ReTweets’ and ‘Repost’, but we can rest in the regeneration we have in Christ Jesus. Now go and and copy this link on your status so I can feel successful.