After I’d had my cup of coffee and gotten ready for the day, I walked over to my computer and sat down. I closed my eyes for a second and let out a big exhale. I was mentally preparing myself to go through what had happened on Facebook since I’d turned it off the night before.
I logged in to find 130 new friend requests and 100 or so other notifications. I’ve still not checked my messenger back log yet. Now before I sound like I’m tired of the volume, I want to say that I actually love this. Every interaction and every new friend is such an unexpected joy for me. I don’t know how or why this all started, but I’m glad it did! It’s given me depth to my life that I did not have a few weeks ago, when I didn’t even use my Facebook and had only one friend on here.
The one thing that does make may day harder, however, is sifting through the hundreds of friend requests in order separate out the real people from the fake accounts and spam. At the moment, it’s probably taking at least an hour or two out of my day each day. The reason I’m sharing this is because something profound happened today, and I wanted to share that story with you.
I started going through the latest batch of friend requests, doing my best to identify what’s real and what isn’t. Some make it easy, and you immediately know it’s a pornographic spam account, where others are more difficult to identify. As I was going through the backlog of requests, I came across one such profile that I thought was fake. It had a few of the common signs.. Not very many pictures. No bio in the header. The large banner image showed a clothed woman’s body at the midsection. My mind filled in the rest, and it actually looked like this was going to be something that was more suggestive and graphic. But, to my surprise, this time was different.
I expanded the image with a readiness to close and quickly deny the request, but instead of seeing what my mind had filled in, I saw a different image. Before me was a lovely middle-aged African woman, clothed in a modest, sparkly purple dress, with her two precious children beside her. She was beaming with pride, glad to show off her family to the world. She very likely hadn’t realized that Facebook would crop the photo in the banner when she posted it.
Immediately, as I saw this, I heard God speak to me and say, “This is how my perspective looks. Your perspective was what you saw when your mind filled in the rest.”
I was humbled and struck to the core. How many people have I “filled in the rest” for when I looked at them with an incomplete picture in my own mind?
I wanted to share this story with you all today to encourage you with this quick reminder:
Our picture of a person is incomplete. Like a photo cropped in the middle, we don’t know how the start or end looks. Don’t let your mind fill in the details. Ask God to fix your perspective!