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I love Jesus. I am not ashamed of the Gospel. But I’m not guilted into copying & pasting nor reposting every lame statues update, jpeg image and gif file that tells me I have to. “If you love Jesus you will repost, if you love Satan you will keep scrolling.” Bull crap! Today it’s Facebook, but we went through the same thing for about a decade with e-mail. There is something that compels people to dream up new ways to get people to re-forward. It doesn’t have to be religious; Facebook is not donating 3 cents each time you retweet that sick image of the little girl with cancer (if that’s even what the picture is of).
The e-mail petitions used to kill me. Let’s say you get a petition in your inbox for a cause you really believe in. If you add your name and forward to 10 people, as soon as those people sign and forward you’ve just created 10 different permutations of the petition list. There is no way to consolidate that raw data back into one list. Even if the 1000th person forwards it to whomever, what they will end up receiving is hundreds, possibly thousands of different lists. Many of the names will be duplicates, especially of the early signatures, but each petition will be unique. If you sign and forward, a day or two later you will start getting the petition again, and no two will be alike even if your is signature is #25 on each one.
I am not ashamed Jesus, so not forwarding your email or reposting your status will not cause him to be ashamed of me before his father. You can read my Facebook profile or any one of 400 blog posts to know how I feel about Jesus. I teach Bible at a Christian school, and preach frequently in our chapel and at a small church nearby. I lead a youth group, play and sing praise & worship music, have driven a church van and some years ago played on a men’s church softball team. When I “keep scrolling” it’s not because I love Satan. Just for the record.
Did you remember to tap your keyboard twelve times before publishing this? 😉
I am not on Facebook and won’t be there either, but emails with good/bad luck tag lines are certainly out of place in a Christian context.
I didn’t even touch on good luck/bad luck scenarios. (Forward this to 20 friends in 30 minutes and something good will happen.) It’s the manipulation, including from Christians, that rubs me the wrong way. “Forward this to every person you know. Remember, if you’re ashamed of Christ he will be ashamed of you before his Father.” If I was ashamed of Christ there wouldn’t be a “Praise the Lord” tag on the front of my truck. But I’m still nor forwarding every piece of junk that crosses my inbox.
What I find is that is that a small portion — maybe 15% — of the email that fits this category is actually worth forwarding until they ruin it with the, ‘Now send this to ten people’ line.
If I have a friend or two that might appreciate it, I delete all that content — most of them need some cleaning up of headers and footers by that stage anyway — and send them to those handpicked people.
I also often find content online that I think more people should see and my blog stats tell me that even there people don’t click the links. So I copy and paste and essentially create my own email forwards. I’m waiting to see if one I generated ever circles around and comes back to me!