Facebook Therapy

God has been doing a lot of pruning on me lately. When He does that, He is usually getting me ready for something, though I have no idea what it might be.

One of the things He has been doing involves Facebook. If you’re not familiar with it, you can become "friends" with someone on there, at which point you can see each other’s profile, chat online, and they show up on your profile as your friend for all to see. I started out just "befriending" people who are currently a part of my life, but then people from my past started finding me and requesting to be my friend. That was when the pruning started.

Many of these are old friends I am glad to hear from, glad to know how they’re doing and what’s going on in their life. But there are others that I turn up my nose at, not really wanting to be their friend. Why? I never really liked them. It could be that they did something to me in the past that I never quite forgave them for, and I wrote them off as someone I wanted nothing to do with. In some cases, they are people that I at one time considered myself to be better than and didn't want to be associated with.

Obviously, these are not grudges I am actively holding, and I had all but forgotten about them until the people tried to befriend me on Facebook. At that point I had to acknowledge how I felt about that person and why, and decide whether or not to let bygones be bygones. Most of them are people I went to high school with, and I have hopefully matured considerably since then in every way, including spiritually.

So far I haven’t refused to befriend anyone because of a past grudge. God has been working in my heart to show me that these are His children too. I am not better than any of them, and if they have wronged me, I have an obligation to forgive them. I am still working through these things, but God is using it to clean out the clutter in my heart and move me on to a new level in my walk with Him.