There’s this funny scene in “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days” where the main character Greg is at a pool and is trying to impress a girl. He sees a guy do a fancy dive that seems to impress the girls so he tries it too. When he gets up to the high dive board and finally looks down he freezes. There’s a smaller girl in line behind him who can tell Greg is scared to jump in and teases him about it. When he finally gets to the end of the board he awkwardly falls off the edge, catches his swim shorts on the edge of the diving board and leaves them there while he tumbles to the water below.
Articles and studies from many different sources like Psychology Today and Huffington Post are beginning to see the connection between loneliness and social media. While social media has some positive uses, those who use it most frequently often have higher levels of anxiety, more loneliness, less real social skills, and measure friendships and connections in unhealthy or unrealistic ways. So what’s the solution?
There is a phrase that was intended for good, and has helped millions of people understand their faith journey in a more biblical way. But there has been a negative side to this phrase – often spoken in churches or evangelistic outreaches – that our highly individualistic modern culture has bought into. Here’s the phrase “a personal relationship with Jesus.” We do have an individual and personal relationship with Jesus when we follow Him, but Jesus focused just as much on the “we” as the “me” in His teaching and commission.
So if Jesus followers are supposed to be connected on a deep level in real life because we are connected on a spiritual level, and we live in a highly individualistic culture where we are desperate for meaningful relationships but often lack the skills or have anxiety over interacting with others (a little like Greg overlooking the pool) what’s the answer? Beginning May 21st until the end of June we’re going to discover together what the bible has to say about “DEEP CONNECTIONS IN A SHALLOW WORLD.”