Highlands Post Column Jun-2015

Hi, my name is Elise, and I am an affirmation addict.” Elise is 16 years old and one of 1.44 billion people who regularly post message on the internet using Facebook. Elise explains the symptoms of her disease: “We crave affirmations from our peers in the form of ‘likes’, ‘favourites’, ‘shares’, ‘re-tweets’, ‘re-blogs, and ‘re-vines’.” “It’s almost as if we become irrelevant without loads of Internet attention”, she says.

Is everyone on Facebook like this? Probably not! But what’s common is that most of them are overwhelmingly selective in what they share. Tending to highlight the positives while downplaying (or ignoring) the negatives.

Why do we do this? Why do we work so hard on social media to create these shiny, friendly, interesting, online, pixelated pamphlets to market ourselves? It’s probably a mixture of vanity and low self-esteem. And the result is plastic portraits talking to other plastic portraits with hardly anyone connecting on a real level.

What if things were different? What if instead of FakeBook we all had RealBook accounts? And, instead of choosing what we share, a team of photographers and videographers documented our lies and secret shames and published them with all the polish of a top marketing firm.

And in between the scandal… gripping news about ‘Bills paid on time’ … and then … ‘Frustrations at work lead to big move’ and (wait for it) ‘Dishwasher packed and then (gasp!) unpacked again’.

RealBook would be embarrassing on every level: it would highlight our humdrum moments, magnify the embarrassing ones and cast a painful light on those things we try to hide.

Here’s the good news. Despite our ‘RealBook’ profile, God has ‘friended’ us through Jesus anyway. Jesus came to die on the cross to pay for the stuff we’d never want known… the muck that we rake under the digital carpet. And, despite all the sorry detail, Jesus is still interested! In fact, He’s fascinated. Jesus wants to spend eternity with you so much that He staked his life on it – at the cross.

Here’s how the Bible puts it. Romans 5:8 tell us that “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners Christ died for us”.

So, will you get real with God? Will you own up to Him about the real you? If you do, Jesus promises He’ll forgive all your mistakes. And the greatest affirmation you could ever want or need is what Jesus did at the cross. It’s there that we see just how much God really loves us.

Ian Brunton