Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing. I Thessalonians 5:11 (NRSV)
Do you Twitter? Are you LinkedIn? Do you have friends on Facebook?
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been slow to adopt much of the social networking revolution on the Internet. I never could quite understand why a whole bunch of people would want—or especially need—to know what I’m doing or what I’m thinking at some specific moment in the day, in 140 characters or less. (That’s Twitter, for those of you who don’t “tweet.”) But one of the great benefits of my work is that I get to hang around a younger generation. I was sitting with a group of them one night in the lounge of one of my school’s residential buildings, so I started asking them about Twitter and the like—and sharing my skepticism.
“Do you like people?” one of the students asked me.
“Well, of course I do,” I said. “But what does liking people have to do with telling them everything all the time?”
She smiled one of those smiles you get when someone knows something you don’t. “Sharing hope and joy with people is a great gift. Why wouldn’t I want to do that in every way I can?”
I’m still not convinced about tweeting and some of those other electronic communities. But I was convinced that night about something else: As a person of faith, I’m called to share my hope and joy with others all the time, no matter how I do it. That’s why, today and every single day, whether on Facebook or face-to-face, I have a goal: offering five friends a kind word, a good thought, a gift of hope.
Open my eyes today, oh, God, to those who need an encouraging word. And open my mouth (or move my fingers) so that I might offer it.
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