You are no longer friends with this person

Today I discovered that I had been defriended recently on Facebook.

I can't help but think what a loss it is for us both. I've known this person for about six years, and I've always considered them someone worth knowing better if the opportunity should arise. Unfortunately, it hasn't. Following that initial rush in 2011 when our paths first crossed, our social interaction generally has been limited to exchanging pleasantries after church and an uneventful Facebook friendship that apparently ended a few months shy of the six-year mark.

I know people can take it personally when someone defriends them. Some see it as a personal rejection, while others blame themselves for driving the other person away. The element of rejection is undeniable -- defriending someone on social media is an active choice, after all -- but my main reaction to this act is simple curiosity. Why this person, why now?

Was it simple housecleaning? Some people have hundreds, if not thousands, of friends on Facebook, including family, actual friends, neighbors, co-workers, teammates on Mafia Wars, and even former receptionists from the doctor's office. It'd be hard to fault anyone for wanting to cull the herd a little under those circumstances.

On the other hand, my former Facebook friend and I see each other almost every week and there are more than 400 other people who survived the great purge. A housecleaning doesn't seem too likely an explanation, all things considered.

Maybe it's politics. I'm usually content to live and let live, but I have been absolutely forthright in my denunciation of Donald Trump, and that's upset a few people. Maybe that was it. The election was a divisive affair, and while I wouldn't defriend someone myself, I wouldn't hold it against someone else who did.

Could it be religion? I've shared a few things over social media that disappoint me about the church, and from time to time I tweet commentary on the worship service as it unfolds. It's all in good fun, and the pastor takes it in good stride, but I can see how it could bother someone.

It's impossible to say what set the ball rolling without knowing the story, and no one has told me. That's what lends the whole affair an air of the surreal. When an actual friendship ends, there's something you can point to. There was a fight, or an act of betrayal, or there was a completely natural drift over the years as life and geography come into play.

With social media, there's none of that. There's a passive-aggressive decision to click a button, a sense of satisfaction that it's over. Except that its not. If you move in the same social circles, you're going to feel an odd sense of dislocation the next time you run into the person you defriended. Once they realize they've been defriended, that dislocation is going to get downright awkward.

Here's the cut and jib of it for me. I'm cautious about making friends, but when I consider someone a friend, it's solid. Friendship is a sacred bond, something we neither pretend to nor lightly cast aside. I'm a little looser about whom I'll identify as a friend on social media, but I don't add people just for the sake of it. They have to be decent people too, or it won't happen. And when I add someone, I don't remove them.

Why's that? It's simple. For one thing, the snub in defriending someone is undeniable. We may pretend it's not there, but it takes a conscious decision and deliberate act to defriend someone, and there's no way to undo that decision without drawing attention to its being made in the first place. Defriending someone on social media almost certainly is going to create ripples offline as well.

But just as importantly, defriending someone carries a cost for us as well. The differences in perspective and experience that different people bring to the table can cause a lot of friction and weary us, but they also enrich our lives.

Shutting people out of my life because I disagree with them will leave me – and possibly them – poorer for the experience. I'm a Christian, an identity that makes me treasure my Muslim, Jewish and atheist friends all the more.

In the same vein, I'm sorely disappointed in my friends who voted for Donald Trump, and I'm deeply critical of their decision; but that doesn't mean that I hate them or don't want to hear from them. We probably won't change each other's minds, but we can grow in understanding of and appreciation for each other.

There is a depth of perspective and a vitality of life that we get from interacting with people whose lives and viewpoints differ from our own. When we limit our time to people who only share our views, or when we silence voices that differ from our own, we rob ourselves of the chance to hear new ideas and to grow our roots deeper.

Did my former Facebook friend drop me from social media because I was too angry, too liberal or too disrespectful? I'll never know. All I do know is this: We'll see each other in church on Sundays, and we'll continue to be friendly to one another, but our ideas are less likely now to cross than in the past six years.

And we're both a little poorer for it.



Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Psst! I totally stole this from Brucker.

quitting time

I've quit Facebook.

I've laughed at witty things my friends have said or shared, but it's time to stop. I've enjoyed sharing things of my own that people have liked, and I've enjoyed seeing the odd thing or two that I write go viral. But at the end of the day, I've had to add up the time I've spent on Facebook and other web sites, and ask myself if there aren't better ways to spend my time.

And so I quit. At the moment, my account is only deactivated, but if I don't change my mind by Jan. 5, I'm probably going to take the nuclear option and close my account entirely.

The day after I deactivated my Facebook account was Christmas. That morning I got up, I ate breakfast with my family and we unwrapped presents. My children and I played with their new toys together, we talked about what they had been reading lately, and at the end of the day I shredded some old financial documents before going to bed.

It was a refreshing day, filled with family and with real-world experiences. In the days since, I've watched “Doctor Who” with my children, played with the youngest, and read a book. I've even written a blog entry, in what I hope is the first break in a long and painful logjam.

It's not a change I expect everyone will want to make. My friend Jeff, for instance, is always quick to stress the value he perceives in social networking for building and maintaining relationships.

I confess, I've never seen this value, no matter how much Jeff has stressed it.

Relationships just don't happen over an Internet medium, except in the most bare-bones, utilitarian sense. Which of us, in talking about the great times we've had with friends, ever stops to recount a meaningful status update? We may share, away from Facebook, things that we saw or read there, but those are always sidebars to the main events of our lives.

I've always enjoyed the pictures my friend Ruth shares of her children, but the memories I treasure are from the visits I've had with her and her family. I recall with great clarity the Saturday afternoon we went to lunch in Port-au-Prince then caught up with one another in their living room.

Facebook lets me know when my brother has gone for a ride on his horse. Seeing him in person or hearing him on the phone, I get a fuller measure of his experience. His shoulders will slump with that so-good fatigue, and his voice will carry his excitement as he shares where he's ridden and what he's seen. You don't get that on social media. Conversation isn't just a two-way exchange of words; it's a dynamic system, where one person's enthusiasm and interest feeds the other's.

Break it up and remove that direct interaction, and you're left to interact with the cold text another person has left, often hours earlier.

In the end Facebook, like most of the rest of the Internet, involves sitting alone by the computer or with your phone, interacting with what you imagine the other person to be. It is the shell of a conversation, an echo of a relationship trying to emulate the real thing.

God knows we want the real thing. Relationships these days are so impermanent. Children move hundreds of miles from their parents when they move out on their own, and then move regularly with the demands of work. Even marriage isn't what it once was. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average marriage will last seven years.

Facebook gives us the illusion of permanency and connection. Thinking about your college roommate? Look him up. Want your parents to know what their grandchildren are up to? No problem! It's a piece of cake to share the contents of your digital camera in an album they can look through at their leisure. Feeling nostalgic for that guy in high school who used to look down his nose at you? Hey, no problem – he'll be sending you a friends request any day now.

Facebook has kept us networked with one another, but it hasn't brought us any closer together, and that's the difficulty I have with it. Too often, in fact, it tears us apart where we expect it to pull us together.

If you're my friend on Facebook, after the events of Sandy Hook, you probably saw me voice some thoughts on the subject of gun control. If you agree with me, you might even have clicked Like. But if you didn't, it's just as possible you got annoyed at what you saw as an attack on your Second Amendment rights.

Being the polite sort, you didn't say anything then, but it stuck under your craw. You've heard the gun control rhetoric before, and it's never impressed you. But when you came back to the site, my comment was still there, still obtrusive, and still annoying to you.

If we'd been in the same room, we might have had a conversation on the subject. We would have known when each other wanted to speak, and we would have paused and allowed for the back-and-forth of a proper discussion. In the process, we would have moved beyond the surface arguments to some of the deeper issues.

But since this exchange would have happened on Facebook, each of us would have said all that we wanted to, with no modulation for interruption or discussion, after the initial comment was made without having you specifically in mind. And so, though neither of us intended to, we've driven a little wedge between us.

It gets even worse when our friends get involved, because often they have no relationship to provide context at all. Disagree with someone's post, and you may be called delusional, or worse. Like the rest of the Internet, the Facebook platform just doesn't support actual dialogue and understanding as much as it does strong language and hard feelings.

As my friend Indigo once observe, “Social networking just brings people together. It doesn't guarantee what happens next.”

Facebook goes on, but it will go on without me. As much as I have loved George Takei's page, as much as I have loved the ecards I have seen, as much as I have enjoyed the clever fan pages and all the witty graphics that get passed around, and as much as I love hearing about Jeff's trip to the supermarket to buy some mustard, it isn't worth it.

If I take everything Facebook delivers, and I weight it on a balance against the other things that could be done with the time, particularly the value of the relationships that we sacrifice to use the service, Facebook cannot measure up. Most things in life are better in moderation, but Facebook? I have found that for me, at least, it is like the proverbial obese man at an all-you-can-eat buffet. There's nothing wrong with the buffet, but perhaps it would be better to go home and have a salad.

I'm setting down my tray and I'm walking away from the building, with no plan for the foreseeable future of going back.

This entry is a blog response to "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish."



Copyright © 2012 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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That ugly, vicious thing we call divorce

I don't get divorce.

Much of this is due to my parents, I'm sure. They were married my entire childhood, and still are. They've fought over money and they've dueled over how to raise the kids, but they've never parted ways. Sometimes my mom gets aggravated over my dad's sense of humor, and sometimes he zones her out, but here they are in their late 60s, and they're still together. They celebrated their 44th anniversary just this year.

And here I am in my late 30s, and it seems like one couple after another whom I've known is coming apart. They swore to be there for one another, never to part, and that foundation of love that they laid is splitting. My best friend and his wife married 17 years ago. They're separated. My other best friend and his wife married 12 years ago and divorced last year. And now another friend writes, after more than 20 years, "We're divorcing. He won't even consider reconclilation."

Why?
Why?
Why?

Divorce is an ugly, vicious thing. It takes lives that have grown together like flowers whose stems entwine one another so closely that you scarcely can tell where one begins and the other ends, and it tears them apart. Staying married isn't easy -- I doubt anyone alive can possibly begin to explain just how much work, hard work, marriage is, and how much it hurts sometimes -- but God knows it's worth it.  When my heart was torn from me and I dropped into the volcano, it was my wife who saved me. When her mother died and drought came to my wife's life, I was there for her.

Marriage hurts, but in the end, it makes me far stronger than anything else does. I've been short on hope, but I made it through because my wife was at my side. I've lost friends, but I survived because my wife stood by me. I've lost jobs and I've seen dreams die, but because my wife was with me, I came out on top. I lost a son and though it was like the sun was extinguised and all life had vanished from the world, I found the strength to keep moving -- because my wife gave it to me.

How on earth do couples who swore to love one another all their lives, until the bitter parting of death, give that up?

When my friends Myron and Jessica separated two years ago, I told a friend of mine about it. I wished I hadn't. Jon is in his late 20s, but when he heard that two people he had never met were divorcing, I saw the pain in his eyes. His parents had divorced when he was 9, and he's never forgotten.

I have no anger, no harsh words for people who divorce. I know that their pain is deep and beyond expression. All I have is grief that anyone should have to go through such an experience.



Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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linkedin recommendation

As someone originally from the Northeast, I frequently have been disappointed by the quality of drugs available during my trips to the South. I've never found a dealer who could give me a nice cut of weed, one that didn't give me a headache when I smoked it; the last three times I tried to buy coke, the idiot tried to sell me Mello Yello; and the ecstasy dealers, when they weren't peddling useless shit, were so clueless that they actually preferred to sell E at clubs frequented by the police.

Ms. B., however, has renewed my faith in the South as a place to do illegal drugs. She runs her organization with an efficiency that borders on the brutal. There are no snitches in her organization, although there are several buried beneath parking lots and shopping malls in her area. Delivery of the smack was always prompt, discreet and at competitive rates.

What's more, this is some high-quality shit that she peddles. Smoking even a small dose of the crack that she provides was enough to put the monkey on my back, let me see all my bones, and give me an experience that neither I nor the fifty people I allegedly ran into that night will ever forget.

And the angel dust she sells -- wowza! The police claim that I broke the jaws and ribs of sixteen different officers before they were able to take me down.

I would be remiss not to mention the extensive connections Ms. B. has built up with local, state and federal authorities in Georgia. I attribute this not only to her line of work, which always draws official attention, but to her generous nature, which prompts her to give money, cars, expensive watches, junkets and other gifts to friends in need of them.

In short, you cannot ask for a better employee for your organization than Ms. B. She is going places, and believe me, wherever she is going, she will take a horde of clients in her wake. I would not hesitate to do business with her again, once I am eligible for parole in 2096.



Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission. All rights reserved.


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To absent friends

Last Tuesday as we were eating dinner, Evangeline told me that she does not want to move away from Nova Bastille.

There are no plans to move, but she was not to be put lightly aside. She does not want to leave. She has a school here, she has friends here, and it is, after all, the only home she knows. It soon became evident that she's concerned that we'll have to move because neither I nor her mother is having much luck finding full-time work here in Iowa. The economy is in the tank, and while it doesn't seem to be falling faster, she's concerned we may have to relocate to find a job.

Moving's rough, especially when you're a kid. It's not just the disruption to your life, it's having to start all over. It's having no one, because you've lost all your friends.

Like her father, Evangeline is not a person to make friends at the drop of a hat. She judges people carefully before she commits, and when she decides someone is a friend, she locks onto them for good. Evangeline feels friendship deeply. Losing a friend means having a piece of your heart torn away, and feeling your life flow out that hole every day.

I was reminded recently of this when I came across my friend Erzsébet on Facebook. She and I met in 1993, when she came to Haiti on a short-term missions trip with STEM Ministries.  We bonded quickly. She and another team member joined me and another of the resident missionaries for card games in the evening on our grilled porch, we hung out and talked on the roof of the missions base while parts of the city electric grid turned on and off, and we talked around some of the troubled dynamics that sprang up between the team and the resident missionaries. (I also tormented her ruthlessly with a large plastic tarantula my brother had sent me, at every chance I got.)

In Haiti, we relied on a private service to bring us our mail.  Letters were a godsend, a reminder that people back home still thought about us from time to time and cared enough to let us know. Maybe two weeks after she had returned to the States, Erzsébet surprised me with a long, hand-written letter, beginning a relationship that was to last for five years. We continued writing back and forth, and when I returned to the United States, we switched to e-mail and to weekly phone conversations that could run for hours.

I'm fairly certain that Erzsébet's mom, who had been on the missions trip with her daughter, had high hopes for our relationship. Those hopes never came to fruition. Shortly after I got married in 1998, Erzsébet and I lost touch. I tried calling her about two years ago, but the phone number I had was no good, and I couldn't find a new one.

I have thought of her plenty the past 10 years, if not every day then certainly every week, at times with a soul-ache that is numbing in its intensity. We were close enough, I think, that if we were to connect again, especially in person, things would slide back into place and the years, like this too, too sullied flesh, would melt and resolve themselves into a dew.

I've told Evangeline that when we love someone, whether a friend or a family member, we remove a piece of our soul and give it to them to care for, to remember us, and to stay connected with us. I saw Erzsébet's profile recently on Facebook, and I stared at her picture in wonder, recalling some of the conversations we had shared and the letters we had written and read. I could feel my soul crying out for its missing piece, and I wondered if hers ever feels that same longing.

Sometimes that ache overwhelms me because of the number of friends I've lost track of. There is Brian VanWyhe, the English teacher I worked with at Cradle of Life Christian School, who became my closest friend in Haiti; and Dan Kramer, another close friend who joined STEM the same time I did and whose wedding I foolishly did not attend.

There are other people, including some who live right here in the Bastilles, whom we lost track of after our old church disintegrated. I wonder how we can bear to give our hearts to our friends, when we value friendship so lightly that we let it go over a paltry argument, a failed church, or even over nothing at all.

Evangeline is fearful of losing friends if we have to move, though neither her mother nor I have said we are actively considering such a course of action. That is the edge of a razor I would do anything to spare her, but I know that ultimately she will feel it one day, and it will cut her deeply.



Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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who'll stop the rain (new lyrics)

Long as I remember, rain's been coming down.

Clouds of mystery throwing confusion on the ground

Must be ten years gone now, trying to find the sun,

And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain.

I went to Virginia, seeking shelter from the storm.

Caught up in the fable, I watched the tower burn.

Broken vows and new starts never loose the chains,

And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain.

Heard the children singing, how we cheered for more.

We huddled close together, trying to keep warm.

Still the rain kept falling, pouring on our ears,

And I wonder, still I wonder, how to stop the rain.

the transmigration of bunk beds

On a happier note than lost children, we have just rounded out a very socially active period at our household with the migration of a set of bunk beds from a friend's house to ours.

The girls last night got to sleep in their very own bunk beds for the first time ever. The beds were a gift from our friends Anne and Vince, whose son no longer needs them. To be honest, I'm not really sure why they had a pair of Ikea bunk beds with only one child, but I'm not going to begrudge them the opportunity to pass on to us a costly piece of bedroom furniture. We broke the beds down, moved them, and set them up in the span of a single day, ranging from around 1 p.m. until 10:30 p.m. (Evangeline was difficult to get moving this morning, but that was to be expected.)

The new beds allow us to use less floor space for bedding, giving us the chance to use the bedroom for other things as well, such as some of their toys and maybe a place we can create an impromptu art studio for Evangeline.

This wraps up a rather active weekend where we have had a steady procession of friends and guests cycle through our house in rapid succession. Saturday night, we had friends for dinner whom we've got to know through our children, who attend or have attended preschool with one another, and through my biweekly Dungeons and Dragons sessions. Sunday evening was another of those D&D friends, followed Monday by another good friend of Evangeline's from preschool.

Thank God for friends. It seems at times that we have so few of them, and we so quickly pass from one another's lives. Every connection we have with another person reminds us that we are real, and gives us another opportunity to see God.

still messy, still faithful

Got some pretty nice feedback today on my "A Messy Faith" mailing list, owing to the most recent entry, "Trapeze Act." In that particular piece, I write about realizing that I've reached a turning point in my faith, principally that it's gone from being something dogmatic or intellectual in nature to one where it's matured into that relationship thing we talked about in college but I don't think I ever really understood at the time.

I remember in particular how nuts it used to drive me when someone said the Bible was inconsistent. When I was a member of the Assemblies of God, I remember hearing several times from the pulpit that the Bible is not a history text, a science text or what have you, but when it speaks on those points, it is infallible and inerrant. I can't buy that, I'm afraid; the Bible is a collection of stories about God, and there's little evidence that the ancient Hebrews regarded it in the vein of infallibility that American fundamentalists, evangelicals and Pentecostals do.

There's enough inconsistency in the details -- how many angels were at Christ's tomb, how many demoniacs went by the name Legion, whether it was a Canaanite or a Syrophoenician woman whose daughter was afflicted with a demon -- that I can't believe it's completely accurate as a historical document, down to every detail, as it's often presented by believers. Leviticus and Deuteronomy, for instance, describe the same exact sacrifice and each one specifically says that the other's way of preparing the sacrifice is wrong. (One says the meat must be boiled, the other says it must be baked.)

We're right to point out that these are small things, and they don't contradict anysignificant doctrines about God, Christ or anything big like that -- but they're still there, and that raises questions about more fantastic elements of Scripture. What about Noah's Ark? What about Jonah? I don't know. By faith, I'm a creationist, but I no longer feel a need to pretend that creationism is scientific; it's just something I accept on faith, even though I can present you with intelligent arguments about how a creation model fits data that evolution doesn't, as well as much of the data that is held up as support for proof of evolution.

I choose on faith to believe that the events of the Fall, however mythic, still happened. Death entering the world through the sin of Adam is an important point as Paul relates it in Romans. If death already existed as part of the pre-Fallen world, I can't see that there's much hope for a world without death after the Second Coming, since it's already part of God's creation. But that's a faith-based argument rather than one based on science.

I think I really reached the turning point when it was obvious we were going to lose Chris. I was on the phone with my best friend, a total bonehead named David McCandless, and I was in tears I was so upset. I said point-blank that if this was how God treated kids like Chris, I really wasn't sure I wanted any part of him. David asked, without any judgment or rancor in his voice, where I would go then, and I realized just how thoroughly screwed I was -- there was nowhere else I could go. I'd seen enough of the real thing, and had enough of full-contact Christianity to know that even if this wasn't as bad as it could get, Christ was still worth following.

But I've never viewed Christ the same way since. He's grown inestimably bigger in my sight.

One of the lessons that's stuck with me since has been the role of community. The entire experience with Christian was rougher on my wife than on me in part because our church fell apart and she was left without a real community to support us as we were going through everything. I still had McCandless and my fellow weirdoes over at CHRefugee, though even then things like my job at WCN became a way to escape the pain (which of course made things worse for my wife).

There were mercifully few people who told me to buck up and have faith that God would work things out -- although there are always a couple people like that waiting in the wings.

One of the holiest responses I received was that September or October, just before the ax fell. We were trying out/helping out a little at a new church in the Princeton area, and a friend of ours from our old church was also there. Maura asked how things were, and when I started to tell her, she must have seen some of the pain in my face even though I kept it from my voice, because her heart broke right then and she gave me a hug. I started bawling on the spot because of the honest compassion and concern she was expressing. That, I think is what Christ does. He doesn't tell us how to behave or give us proper perspective. He sees that we're in pain, even if we won't admit it to ourselves, and he lets us cry.

McCandless, whose opinion of my writing I hold in tremendous estimation, writes, "Just wanted to let you know that you are doing an excellent job writing your articles... They're very good. Perhaps someday you'll have enough that you could compile them and see if my agent wants to market it as a book."

Actually, as I admitted to him, that's one of the reasons why I'm doing this as a blog/mailing sort of thing. I'm hoping that the writing will market itself to an extent, as people forward links and articles to one another. I put the link in my signature file, but that's about the extent of the marketing I'm doing. When I started this, I invited about fifteen people to sign on,and that was about the extent of the promotion. Only seven people signed up right away, and one person has joined since. I've pretty much taken the view that if God intends to use it, he will, and trying to push it is more likely to bring frustration to myself and other people. I'm reminded somewhat of David, who ran from Saul with no intention of building an army to fight him, but soon found himself surrounded by men who would prove to be the basis of his army when he became king later on. He just hid in the wilderness, and people flocked to him.

So far, it's paying off a little. I'm keeping track of the traffic through Stat Counter, and I'm noticing that there are a few people coming to the site through links in their e-mail, and a number of people are taking the time to read more than one blog entry at a time. And when they leave comments on the blog, I make sure I keep them there. Later on, I figure I can use those posted comments as evidence that I have a readership/platform/audience.

not in the funny papers

A friend of mine wrote this comic, based on a church drama I wrote about telling off God. The occasion for the drama was the loss of my foster son.Indigo did a fantastic job, and made the cuts I needed to make in the drama.

She's amazing.