Nat'l Un-Friend Day: Digging deep for shallow relationships

Today was, supposedly, "National Un-Friend Day" on Facebook. My own "collection" of 826 people, with whom I enjoy enormously erratic levels of interpersonal connection, does sometimes cause me pause. And for a few minutes, I thought about dropping perhaps a dozen distant acquaintances from my list--people I might or might not recognize if I encountered them at Wegmans.

But then I remembered Doug Newton's recent editorial in Light & Life magazine, and I thought, "Would B.T. Roberts really have amassed 2,000+ friends by now? And, if so, should I strive for that level of connectivity? Or, would B.T. (whom I consider a hero in the faith, and myself his direct descendant in the Free Methodist denomination)--would this spiritual giant have chosen to "hang out" online, or would he have invested himself in other ventures, reaching out to people and promoting his passion for justice, redemption, and purity of heart in ways that surpassed this oft-times superficial venue for human interaction? Or would B.T. Roberts' own maturation and the development of his ideals have been thwarted by too many games of Bejeweled Blitz?

And by the time I'd considered all that and become thoroughly baffled by my own confusing set of questions, I got distracted by some other urgent electronic plea for my attention, and I didn't care to attempt the tedious and taxing task of paring down my list.

(Do you suppose this resistance to friend sorting has anything to do with my propensity for clutter? Blech! Forget I asked that! These are people, not Post-It Notes! Does anyone else find this Facebook phenomenon, this culture-altering tidal wave of cacophonous communication, more than a little unsettling...?)