April Devotional - What is friendship? Don’t ask MySpace!
1 April 2007
Love is patient….. love is kind. … it is not proud….. it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
1 Corinthians 13:4-7 NIV
It’s been a while since I’ve written a devotional. Partly this is due to post-operative haze but also due to a preoccupation with MySpace. I began writing a blog on blogger.com in December which I really enjoy. Then I discovered MySpace in February and started uploading material and ‘painting and decorating’ my space and making ‘friends’ – only to have my profile deleted a few days ago by the MySpace ‘police’.
It’s a strange ‘1984’ Big Brother type feeling to have lots of ‘friends’ and lovely comments posted on your space one minute and then to appear not to exist the next. In fact, anyone trying to locate me now on MySpace is told ‘this user has had their account deleted.’ In addition I discovered today that if you send a query to Tom (the techy guy) and not customer queries you will be punished by having your email deleted. This does not sound like ‘friendship’ to me but dictatorship. Funnily enough I’d only commented on the nature of friendship on my blog the night before my deletion, that ‘friends’ on MySpace are more like contacts and you can be anyone’s ‘friend’ including a piece of ‘government cheese’! Many people stock pile ‘friends’ to make themselves appear popular or for sales purposes. This is NOT friendship. Friendship is about a loving relationship. It about caring and serving and is not self-seeking, or empire building. Friendship is an investment and so takes time to build. Paul explains the nature of a loving friendship brilliantly in his famous passage about love quoted above.
I do, however, need to thank MySpace as I was getting rather addicted to it – and addiction to anything is never a good sign! So thank you MySpace for pulling the plug! I might actually be able to get on with writing another book now!
Prayer:
Lord, thank you for all my friends. Help me to value them and to keep You at the centre so that I might be a better friend to others.
Amen
