The Church Sofa

A couple of weeks ago, a setting was changed on my wife’s Facebook account. Her relationship status changed from “Married” to “Single”. From what we could gather… that single action caused a few sharp intakes of breath in our friendship group….

Let me back up a little bit… Back in September I was getting a little bored with the world of Facebook. I’m not sure what it was, it might something to do with being Friends with people who never spoke to me at High School, it might have been the magically changing privacy settings, it might have been those Farmville requests, but I was bored with it.

I then watched the Facebook f8 conference with my jaw dropped open. Dont get me wrong , I do like the look of Timeline, but there were two things I heard during the f8 conference:

1. Facebook wanted me to be Facebook friends with everyone I knew.
2. Timeline meant that they could see anything I’ve posted within a few clicks.

It was that second point that made me nervous, and I decided to quit Facebook. That lasted about 30 minutes until I decided to sign up with a different email address, and build a more stripped down account.

A few months later we decided to do something about the Facebook settings not letting myself and “Mrs Church Sofa” be “Facebook married”, she declared herself to be single – so we could be declared married. Except we got distracted somewhere in between the two stages, and she left herself as single.

We didn’t realise what we had declared until a 20 / 30 minutes later, when the text messages of concern started coming through from some concerned friends – text messages which I’m really thankful for by the way.

Our relationship status’s were “fixed” fairly soon after we received the text messages. These messages, the “congratulations” on our marriage status, and subsequent conversations reminded me of the phrase:

“It’s not real until it’s on Facebook”

How true is that? I’ve heard people say that the internet is making us all a little more lonely, but a simple setting change reminded me how quickly loved ones can show they care, and attention can be on us very quickly because of what we say and do.

During the next few weeks we’ll be focusing on Lent, and the lead up to Jesus’s death on the cross, but what do we do with the time when the focus is on us?

Originally on The Big Bible website

ThatAndy

Married. Dad.

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