Life can get hectic. It can consume us if we let it. The economy being what it is, people are having to work longer hours and earn more money just to keep up with rising prices. In the midst of all of this, we are becoming a social network driven society where people, places, and things are looked at through impersonal ways and impersonal eyes. Friendships are often made and maintained online through social media websites like Twitter, Pinterest, Google, Linkedin, and Facebook.
I have thousands of connections through social media websites and contact lists that I have build. Before deleting two other Facebook profiles that I had, and another 3,000 on my remaining Facebook profile, I had three maxed out Facebook profiles totally 15,000 “friends”. Why I deleted them all is for another story of a chapter in my life, but suffice to say that of all those “friends” that I had, I knew very few of them personally. Maybe you can relate. How many of your Facebook friends are really your “FRIENDS” who you spend face to face time with in your life?
I know hundreds of people in and around my life that I see monthly, if not weekly on a regular basis. A lot of these people are those I work with in business, coach, mentor, and make money with. Of all of them that I actually see each week, a vast majority of these relationships have started and been maintained through technology. Most are solely maintained through technology. The result has been a lot of great connections with people that I am enjoying getting to know, encouraging, and watching their lives unfold – mainly through social media.
Beyond this, comparatively speaking, I have very few “real relationships” where I spend hours a week or even a month, living life with them in community and shared purpose in life. How about you? How many people of those you are connected to do you have a real relationship with where you are living out your lives on a daily or even weekly basis. How much time do you spend with them? How rich and rewarding are those relationships?
God created us for relationship. Maybe this is why social media is so amazingly successful. While Facebook started out as merely a way for college horndogs to rate female students, it has become wildly successful – as have other social media sites – as a way to network on a whole new level in personal and in business life. But like everything we have in life, it inevitably becomes a toy or a tool in our hands. How we choose to use the things we have been given stewardship over is what we will ultimately be judged for in this life (and even the life to come). What we end up getting out of life – the people we end up living out our lives with, the depth of our relationships, and the legacy we will leave behind – fully depends on how well we manage ourselves in the stewardship of the things that have been placed in our lives to use, enjoy, or experience.
The greatest robber of all the potential we have in life are the distractions of the things we allow into our lives on a daily basis. Social media as it is, is where a growing amount of time and energy is spent by most people. Are you losing out on opportunities in your life that God has intended for you because you are distracted by the use of technology in your life? Whether it is games, social networking, surfing the web, or tinkering around with things in your life, how you spend the preciously short time you have on earth will determine the quality of your life you have and the legacy you leave behind.