The Mixed Bag that is Facebook

I've been doing some thinking tonight on my forays into the world of Facebook.

After being involved with Facebook for about a year now, I can say that my experience with it has been a mixed bag. I have learned some things.

My original intent was to use Facebook as a tool to promote the new Saint Laurence Retreat Center and Western Rite Orthodoxy, as well as Orthodox Church Planting.

Instead, I was bitten by the "Facebook Bug" and attempted to contact old college associates.

The positive thing is that I gained two lasting contacts from my college days at my first college, Biola University.

I didn't graduate from Biola. I graduated from Southwest Baptist University after transferring to the SBU Colorado Branch Campus known as Colorado Baptist University.

The most intense college experiences of my life happened at Biola. Biola was the place where my hopes were white hot before being dashed by "The Divine Thwarter."

I had high hopes for a number of reunions and the restoration of some lost friendships. I was looking for absolution. In some ways I found that absolution. In other ways, loose ends remained.

I gained / regained two lost colleagues as a result.

And for this I am thankful to God and grateful.

However, I contacted at least ten former classmates. I only received feedback from four and only two of those had staying power.

It's interesting to look at the nature of the hopes that Facebook generated in me.

I hoped for a lot. I hoped, as John Eldredge writes, "for things the way they should be, not for things the way they are."

I've concluded that the hope I felt properly belongs to a new world, and not to this one.

In the new world that God is creating for all faithful Christians, hopes for joyful reunions will be realized.

In this present world in most respects, such hopes will have to remain deferred.

I can hang onto my hopes for the coming new world. I need to let such hopes in this world go.

The new world can witness the restoration and purification of things I hoped for back then. Those hopes were dashed, but maybe not forever. Maybe those hopes will get replaced by new and better hopes.

Should I reach The New Heavens and The New Earth, I will be able to enjoy the friends I thought lost forever. I will be able to do this as a New Creation. The old will pass away and everything will become new.

I will be able to enjoy all my friends from a sound position of sinlessness and wholeness.

That will be heavenly indeed.

Blessings in the Holy Trinity, One God

Columba Silouan