I have a real problem with Face Book being the place where people air their differences with others and their problems in life!
Emailing our troubles is bad enough. I find that when folks email a friend or colleague about a difficult situation, we are more often than not, misunderstood and many times even make the problem worse! Maybe that’s because we are generally poor communicators with pen and paper (keys and screens, now)! However, I think there are several reasons that we can nail down as to why we communicate poorly in regards to our relational discussions in ink.
1) First, writing, especially emailing for some reason, is a mode in which we are not fully capable of adequately expressing emotions. Its not that emotions are not expressed on the printed page at all! I mean, just pick up a GOOD novel and somewhere in the reading you’ll have to get a hankie to clean up the tears! Sometimes, emotions can actually be expressed too radically, too expressively on the printed page. And then, there are those times when our message is simply cold and emotionless. The PROBLEM is that we cannot adequately express our emotional state when writing others because short emails don’t have the privilege of context like a novel has! Emotions may be adequately expressed by the pen, but be understood inadequately by the reader because there’s no context, no connection that’s been built for the emotions to be interpreted through!
2) Secondly, we sometimes try to have a CONVERSATION with someone when we write them. In our heads, we’re talking it out freely with the one to whom we’re writing. But there’s no way to have a two way conversation when you are writing someone, especially when there’s no immediate response from the reader. That’s why texting and IM’ing works so well. We are actually having a conversation. There’s immediate response. If something is misunderstood, then the recipient can immediately say so and clarification can be delivered. But in a simple one sided email or Face Book offering, we “hear” them answering and speaking back to us, again, in our heads as we write. But the reality is, the recipient of our mail may have an entirely different conversation with us in their head when reading what we wrote to them! Theres just no way to adequately control or anticipate that when we’re writing.
3) Thirdly, again, and akin to point number two, we often try to write like we SPEAK, and yet grammatical skills, vocabulary, and such important aspects of clear speech can simply keep us from being able to pull this off! And so, we wind up writing a stilted version of how we speak and so the reader reads a stilted writing of a speech that we never actually spoke!
I definitely have a special problem with people airing their relational problems on social networks like Face Book! I most especially distrust the airing out, for all to see, of people’s church relationship problems….Problems with the pastor, or how much someone hates a decision that an elder or deacon made. It’s just tacky. And it’s very NON-Biblical! The Bible never gives us the right to publicly spill our guts out against a brother or sister in Christ for all to see like on Face Book! Nor does it give us the option to tell the world what we see wrong with our church or a leader in our church in a public forum like this.
I challenged a church member to show me the Biblical authority that gave them the right to diss the elders in their church on Face Book. They of course couldn’t give me any such Biblical Authority. But, that didn’t matter to them. And that actually reveals another very deep problem within the American church that I won’t have time to address here. But let it suffice for me to say that far too many have put the Bible aside in their lives as the final rule and authority for faith and practice! It’s almost as each man does what is right in his own sight, once again! But God wants us to do what is right in HIS sight (many, many verses state this) and the way for us to know what that “right” way is, can best be found in His precious Word! And His Word DOES NOT tell us to publicly attack other Christians or our church, especially on Face Book where the pagan world parks!
So, be careful what you write! Oh, how I lie down on that bed every night, being a blogger, a radio personality and a pulpit minister! But we ALL should be careful of how we speak AND write!
What we speak is gobbled up by the universe and many times never heard from again. It turns into pixie dust or something. Now, don’t misunderstand me, our words have weight. Life and death is in the power of the tongue. James writes extensively about the tongue and it’s destructive, burning power.
But What we write, stays with us and could plague us, especially with the advent of the internet! Our words will take on a life we never dreamed they could, and may actually haunt us for years to come!
So stay off of Face Book with the personal ills and the Churches problems! How about trying to be an encourager and someone who lifts others up when you write on FB and other social media outlets? There’s so little of that being done that you’d be an instant hit with those who read you.
And when you write an email or a letter, speak as clearly as possible. If something seems unclear to you, it will be unclear to the reader.
