Would Jesus use the "unfriend" button?

Social media has changed the way we all interact and develop relationships. There are definite pros and cons to the use of social media and its prevalence in society. One of the big issues that has come with social networking is the way we end relationships. Instead of working on repairing relationships, it's now as easy as pushing the "unfriend" or "block" button to rid someone from your digital life and  newsfeed. My thoughts today rest on people’s intentions and motivations for their ‘unfriend’ actions. For a tool that can be used to enhance communication and community, it can sometimes be used in negative or unhealthy ways.

I have done it myself.

There are other times when unfriending happens because of good reasons; unhealthy relationships, abusive behavior, the list can be as long as human relationships are complex. However, I see this type of unfriending to be an establishment or maintaining of healthy boundaries. I also hope that such disconnections are as full of grace and respect as possible.

I know of others, however, who will unfriend because they are angry, or petty, or are acting as some perceived punitive response. It can be used by a group of friends to "ostracize" someone from their social group because of some perceived wrong or disagreement that happened with one of the members of the "included" group. It's a way to make a statement that you are not welcomed or wanted in my life anymore. (Now- does that sound like something that Jesus would say?)

 People who will go through the process of cutting someone off of their social media accounts without trying to engage in conversation. People who perceive the act of unfriending to be a definitive statement on the whole relationship.

The Urban Dictionary actually had a great definition (among the many not-so-great definitions) for unfriending: “a coward’s way of conflict management in the world of social networking; to disassociate from someone or something without attempt to resolve conflict or give notice.”

And this is where I challenge the Christianity of unfriending.

As Christians, we are called into relationships with one another and with God. We are told in Proverbs that a friend loves at all times (17.17), that their counsel is earnest and can be trusted (18.24 and 27.6), and not to forsake our friends (27.10).  We are to serve one another in love (Gal 5.13) and encourage and stimulate one another in love and good deeds (Heb 10.24), to even lay down our lives for our friends (John 15.13).  We are called to enter into communication to resolve conflict (Mt 18.15), to chose forgiveness over wrath and anger (Eph. 4.31). Jesus’ ministry was one of building up community, of loving the world, of joining together to love and serve God.

With this basis, I feel sorry for those who unfriend out of spite or anger.  To me it speaks of a spiritual immaturity or unability (dis-ability?) to live out our Christian calling, an unwillingness to strive to be in relationship with one another. It saddens me to think that there are people hiding comfortably behind the ‘unfriend’ process; who prefer to anonymously break relationship rather than build it. It speaks to me of people who don’t realize that knee-jerk unfriending is less a statement on the unfriended person’s offense (whatever it might be) than on the unfriender’s commitment to community, especially community in Christ.

Now, before you protest about how the person you unfriended doesn't "really" know you, how you aren't connected with each other's lives outside of social media, and how they probably won't even notice (or care!) that you unfriended them, I want you to think about something.

 If someone goes out of their way to friend you on social media without really knowing you besides the fact that you go to their church- does that not tell you that they are desperately seeking community with fellow believers? That they want to be included in the "church" family that your pastor is always preaching about? Can you not see that they want to connect to you for the very fact that you are a fellow believer-that they want to fit into this "church" family- and that by unfriending them, you are telling them that you do not find them worthy of being included in your church family anymore.

Think about how devastating that statement could be to a new believer. Think about the people who don't truly feel welcomed I church, but are trying so hard to fit in. Those who have been hurt by other Christians but are giving it another shot. They reach out hoping that what the Pastor says on Sunday mornings is really true. That the church is a family, that they are welcomed there, and that they are surrounded by people who love them- even if they don't really know them. They reach out to connect with this "family"- only to be unfriended and rejected. And we wonder why so many people say that the church is full of hypocrites.

Our actions on social media have real life consequences in the real world. Studies have shown that 60% of people will avoid someone who unfriended them on Facebook in real life. Think about that. The person that you unfriended on Facebook is going to avoid you at church. Church- the place that is supposed to be a "family" for believers. Does causing division and hurt feelings in the body glorify God? Is unfriending a fellow Christian over petty reasons worth the cost of broken fellowship, awkward avoidance of each other at church and in public, hurt feelings,

and demonstrating to the world that the church really is no different than the world?

I have to give an empathetic NO.

When we “delete” people out of our networks, we end any opportunities to share God’s love and truth, and any needed future help and support, with them. When we “delete” a brother or sister in Christ, we’re violating the principles of unity, forbearance and forgiveness. I have found getting “unfriended” by fellow Christians to be far more hurtful than any other unfriending. We ought to apply the same Biblical principles to our social networking that we do to our in-person social relationships. For guess who is behind every computer screen and who Christ has called us to love as ourselves?

   Jesus didn’t “unfriend” people. He didn’t walk away from them. He walked toward them, embraced them, called them away from isolation, invited himself to their homes, and brought salvation with him. He BEFRIENDED them. Our work is not to shun them, or to shame them, or to fix them. It's not for us to label them as "unworthy" of being in our news feed. It’s to sit at their table, proclaim that gospel in their hearing, live it in their sight.

    That’s what we should be known for.

    Because that’s what our Lord was known for.

Is it ever right to unfriend someone? The answer is yes, of course; some people are abusive or inappropriate in their posts. Why should I subject myself or my friends to that? But then the question, do you just unfriend and allow that person to stumble across their banishment? Or should there still be a process that involves a conversation?

Maybe I am making too big a deal out of this; but I don’t think so. I have been unfriended several times. In the last few years I have found myself “on the out” on Facebook and didn’t know I had been removed. It causes me to pause and ask myself, what made this person feel OK about doing that? And, if we hold up Christ’s standard as important, is that OK for a follower of His to do that? Are these people who I am in some way connected to via Facebook…my neighbor?

Like it or not, unfriending (if you were a friend) is a statement. It tells the person on the other end that you consciously took the time to remove them. You do not want to see their face. You do not want to hear their voice. You are not interested in them and you do not want them to have a window into your life. If there has been a problem between you, then this is a definite step away from. A deliberate step away.

As Christ-followers, are we allowed to do that? I mean go to the extreme end of the argument where someone is your actual ENEMY (not just someone you dislike or are annoyed or offended by) and Jesus says we absolutely, without question, must LOVE them.

Think about that for a second. People who have crossed you, someone you once claimed to cherish, are you willing to actually say, “You are now my ENEMY?” Jesus says, even if they are that — your actual adversary, enemy — you must still engage with that person as modeled by Jesus Himself in Scripture. You must still love them. I don't think that unfriending someone- no matter how hard you try to justify it- can honestly be seen by anyone as an act of love. It's an act of division, an act of no longer wanting to care for or be "bothered" by the person that was unfriended.

Scripture keeps pulling us towards, towards, towards people: back to the table. So the unfriend button on Facebook, for a Christ-follower, should be a sobering thing to stare at.

So, when the thought of unfriending someone crosses your mind, ask yourself a few questions. Will doing give glory to God? Does it demonstrate his love, mercy, and forgiveness? Or does is express condemnation, judgment, disunity, and conflict? Will it bring unity to the body of Christ? Will our actions demonstrate that we are set apart from the world, or that we conform to it and act in the same matter unsaved people do? Does it edify others, or hurt them? What would Jesus do?

As for me, I have made a conscious choice to no longer "unfriend" anyone. If they want to unfriend me, that's fine. But I refuse to be the cause of hurt to a fellow believer . I myself know what it feels like to be on the "fringes" of society and the church, and not really feeling like I fit in. I know what it feels like to be made to feel like I am not "worthy" of entering the church clique that can so intensely dominate Christian social circles. I don't want to cause anyone else to feel that way- even if that's not my intention. It's not worth it to me. I don't want my actions to cause another person to stumble, or to give the world one more reason to justify why Christians are hypocrites and just like everyone else. I promise, from now on, if you're on my friends list- you are there to stay (at least from my end!) Because that's what Jesus would do.

When God prunes people from your life

For it is not an enemy who reproaches me, Then I could bear it; Nor is it one who hates me who has exalted himself against me, Then I could hide myself from him. But it is you, a man my equal, My companion and my familiar friend; We who had sweet fellowship together Walked in the house of God in the throng. Psalms 55:12-15

 Ecclesiastes chapter 3: There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens...a time to tear down and a time to build...a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing... a time to search and a time to give up...a time to keep and a time to throw away.. a time to tear and a time to mend...a time to love and a time to hate.

Through my years of working in ministry, one lesson that I have learned repeatedly is that there are in fact changing seasons in ministry and in life and general. Jobs change, kids grow up, moves are made, goals change, and circumstances fluctuate. There are seasons of waiting, seasons of activity, seasons of hardship, and seasons of ease. Seasons of confusion, and seasons of clarity. God transitions us through life in seasons. One huge aspect of the seasons of our lives are the relationships that we have, and the people who are with us in them.

For most people, myself included, the changes in relationships that come with different seasons in our lives can be one of the harder aspects to accept. When we lose a friendship that we have valued for decades, or we are betrayed by our closest confidant and friend, or there is a rift in our family that isn't able to be repaired, or a loved one who is a huge part of our life dies- we are often left confused and feel the deep void that is left by the person's absence. It can be hard to understand how someone that we were so close with- someone we shared life with- could just be gone. So many times, when someone leaves our lives, that's exactly how it happens. They are here one day and gone the next. Did they ever truly love us? Oh, the pain of a lost friend!

In the past three weeks, I have had two very close people walk out of my life. People who I was sure would be by my side forever. At first, I was very bewildered about what went wrong and why it was happening. Things- as far as I knew- were great. One of these relationships, in fact, had come to a place a few weeks earlier in which the relationship was better than it had ever been. Then out of nowhere one day- suddenly and without warning- it all came crashing down, and they decided to walk out of my life- almost one right after the other. I was so caught off guard and bewildered by what had happened. When I started to pray about what had happened, and asked God why,  God revealed to me that he had allowed it to happen because their season in my life was over.

I think God removed these people from my life in order to protect me.  These people have known my husband and I for a very long time, and they have seen us at both our best and our worst. While on the surface they loved me and wished me well, there were some underlying resentments that were beginning to bubble to the surface. Feelings of jealousy, of unforgiveness, and of pride. Feelings that I didn't deserve the grace and mercy that God has extended to me. Feelings of self-righteousness, resentment and comparison that had slowly built up into a toxic level of  unspoken malice within their hearts towards me.

The thing is, some people hold onto your past, no matter how much you may change. Many times I think it is sub-consciously, but it's there. The very people that watched you at your worst- struggling through your addiction and near death- the ones who prayed for you and always told you how they wished you could just stop and get better- are some of the first people to resent you when you do. The people that should be the happiest that you made it out of the hell of addiction which they had a front row seat to, are sometimes the first to cast stones. Feelings of envy come when they think back to who you used to be, and wonder why you have a good life now while they may be struggling when you were such a rotten person before you came to know God. If you are happier than they are, or blessed with material things that they may not have, or begin to become successful, or have a contentment with your life that may escape them, thoughts creep into their minds about how you don't deserve it. After all, who are you to have a good life when you were so horrible for the first half of it? Why should a drug addict be doing better than they are, when they were a good person for their entire lives? Surely they deserve to be in a better spot than you when they have done the right things their entire lives, and you just started. How is that fair? The bible addresses this exact issue very clearly.

The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard

Matthew 20: 1-16

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. ² He agreed to pay them a denarius^[a] for the day and sent them into his vineyard.

³ “About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. ⁴ He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ ⁵ So they went.
“He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing. ⁶ About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’
⁷ “‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.
“He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’
⁸ “When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’
⁹ “The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. ¹⁰ So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. ¹¹ When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. ¹² ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’
¹³ “But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? ¹⁴ Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. ¹⁵ Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
¹⁶ “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

It is God, and God alone, who decides what to bestow on each of his children. Do I deserve God's grace and mercy? Absolutely not. I am well aware of what a sad excuse I was for a human being before I had on a head on collision with Jesus Christ, and I will be the first one to agree with people who say that I don't deserve how good God has been to me. As horrible as I was, for some reason, God decided that I was worthy of his love. In Romans 9:15, God says that "I WILL HAVE MERCY ON WHOM I HAVE MERCY, AND I WILL HAVE COMPASSION ON WHOM I HAVE COMPASSION." I deserve nothing. The only reason I have been shown the mercy, compassion and grace that I have in my life is because God decided to show it to me.

Ephesians 2:4-9 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ— by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

While I- a lowly former drug addict- certainly don't deserve God's grace in my life, neither does anyone else. No one is righteous, and no one has earned God's grace. It becomes really dangerous when people start comparing what they think they are deserving of, and start taking a mental tally of how they feel they are better than others. We are all sinners that fall short of the glory of God, and when we are able to see that, it makes us not judge others so harshly, because we see how desperately we need grace ourselves.

For I say, through the grace given to me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God has dealt to every man the measure of faith- Romans 12:3

I am saddened over the lost relationships- especially because they were lost over the fact that these two people are upset that my husband and I are doing well and extremely happy. If it were an argument, a falling out, or someway that we had wronged them, it would be much easier to accept the end of the relationship. It hurts to think that these people would be more content if we were still in our addiction, destitute, miserable  and dying and on the fast track to hell. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy, let alone someone I professed to love. To know that people who claim to love you are holding that kind of resentment against you in their hearts and secretly wishing that you were what you used to be is mind- blowing. It is not something I can wrap my mind around, because I have always been happy for others, even if I had nothing and my life was in shambles . Jealously is just something I cannot understand. I want everyone to be happy, and your happiness takes absolutely nothing away from mine.

God knows the heart of people, and he sees all of the hidden motives, agendas, and feelings. What we may miss-especially when we try to look for the good in people- God sees. I really, truly believe that God pruned these relationships from my life because he was protecting my future. The resentments that came to the surface in the past couple of weeks could have turned into something monstrous in a few more months, and the damage could have been much worse. Their hidden attitudes could have manifested in a way that would have been devastating to me personally or to my ministry. I won't question God removing these people from my life, but I hold to the promise that he works all things out for the good of those who love them. Sure, I miss them- and would gladly welcome them back into my life with open arms- but God can see a future that I can't. If they intended to harm me, God prevented it. If  they are able to get to a point in their lives where they truly love me as I am, I'm sure that God will bring them back into my life. Until then, I will continue to pray that God removes anyone from my life who intends to bring me harm.

The bible says that there is NO CONDEMNATION IN JESUS CHRIST, and that includes being condemned for doing the right things. I have come to a point in my life where I have made up my mind to fix my eyes on Jesus, and to continue to do the next right thing and to follow the path he has laid out for me- regardless of the backlash of those who don't agree with it. People can throw my past in my face now and it has absolutely no effect on me, because I know who I am in Jesus Christ. I just pray that one day they can come to the realization of who they are in him, and that we are all the same in his eyes.