New face of friendship
In March I attended the lovely wedding of a friend and saw many familiar faces. Some were those of friends who go way back with me, those folks who started homeschooling about the same time. We had babies together, went on playdates, had tea parties (not the political kind!) and saw each other on a semi-regular basis. These were ladies I had a real connection with, yet I had not seen them in some time. Had one of us moved? No. Had there been a rift? No. We all simply got busy with our lives, our homeschooling and our families. As children got older, interests shifted. As children got their driver’s licenses, moms did not frequent the same activities.
This year I joined the Facebook crowd and have found it great fun to connect with high school and college friends as well as many local folks. I have always made it a point to stay connected with many of our out of town friends and family with a yearly letter usually sent some time after Christmas. I was inspired to do this by Edith Schaeffer’s family letters. As a single girl, I moved around quite a bit after graduating, including a two-year mission term in Europe which led to friendships all over the globe. I often toy with the idea of dropping our family letter but I just cannot bring myself to do it knowing it is my only tie with so many of these friends.
Lately I am appalled at how poorly I have kept up with friends who live here in Chattanooga. Many are on Facebook but that is not the connection I am talking about. Something is wrong when we are no longer in touch with dear friends who live near us but we are in touch with hundreds of friends via social networking sites.
Shortly after that wedding, I attended a gathering at a friend’s house. It was supposed to be a two-hour drop-in. I arrived at nearly the end of the specified time, found three women there as well as the honoree and we sat and chatted for four more hours. It was so soul satisfying to see friends face to face, to laugh together, to share real solutions, to laugh some more, to talk about books (what else is there to talk about?) and to recount God’s faithfulness to us and to our families. You just cannot do that on your Facebook status!
A friend in North Carolina shared a thesis on this subject of social networking. The title was “Twitterpated: False Community on the Internet” by Beth Churchill. Here are some gems with commentary:
“Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter are more about the self and less about others simply because of the difficulty of feeling meaningfully connected to others using only text as a means of communication.”
This is so true. You cannot view someone’s face when they read what you posted, you cannot see body language. Social networking sites offer only a truncated type of relationship building. Compare this with true community in which
“They held one another accountable for their actions, and encouraged one another in faith: “We urge you, brethren, admonish the unruly, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with everyone” (1 Thess. 5.14).
This quality of encouragement is needed by all of us. We need to be on the receiving end as well as the giving end.
“Social networking sites do not provide an adequate substitute for communities formed by real-life relationships, such as Christendom’s communities. Christendom provided adequate context for the forming of relationships, a system of accountability in the building of relationships, and a sense of identity as a result of those relationships. Wherever social networking sites provide hints of these things, they provide them insufficiently.”
Now I am not saying that social networking sites are bad and should be discontinued. They just should not supplant your real friendships. Even though I tell myself that I only spend 15 minutes or so every day on Facebook, that time could be accumulated and instead used to have a very meaningful visit with a neglected friend. Again it is a matter of priorities: we need to be sure we are connected in a real way with our friends, we need to be sure that our 15 minutes of facebook time a day is not the only way we are nourishing friendships and feeding our souls.
So please take the time to call those friends you have neglected and plan a time you can meet with one or two of them together for a breakfast before starting your homeschooling day. Share a walk together on the Riverwalk, or a tea at a tea-room. Find a quiet place, free from distractions, and share your heart with each other. Then you can post about that lovely time to your facebook status. . . or NOT. Seriously, let that be your mother’s day gift to yourself: to get in touch with at least one local friend you have neglected or to call up someone you know needs encouragement or to plan a get together with a woman wiser than yourself.
“This communicating of a man’s self to his friend works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joy, and cutteth griefs in half.” —Francis Bacon
— JMT