Does God use Facebook?

This year my boss Neil has asked me to lead the sister Challenge ministry we have over at Santa Monica College once a week and Tuesdays are my days to go over there and lead a small group and get to know some of the students there. Usually I try to get there around 11am, prayer-walk a bit, start the study (and lunch :) at 11:30 and go from there. Today didn't get there till almost noon because of stinkin' TRAFFIC - ugh. I seriously hate the 10 freeway, along with the 5, the 101 and the 405...all of them really. But I digress. I decided to to a 4 week study focusing on God and Facebook (yes, Facebook, I figure if everyone goes on it all the time it'd be good to use that to my advantage, plus, I love FB :) at the beginning and kind of see where the students are that come to the small group and I thought I'd use a series I came up with last year - really God gave me the creativity though because I know myself and I am not this creative :)

Week 1 is "God has friended you" and uses the Facebook analogy of God friend-ing us and how He gives us the choice to confirm or ignore His request. I love doing studies like this because even though I went through it last year I always get something new out of it with whoever I'm having the study with.

We looked at many verses about God taking the initiative with us, how He has been pursuing us since the beginning and how courteous He is, because He literally does give us the choice to confirm Him as the God we live for or ignore His request and continue living for ourselves. One passage we looked at was Exodus 3:1-6 when God initiated an encounter with Moses through the burning bush. He tells Moses to take off his sandals because he is standing on sacred ground and one of the girls there today, Kelly, said that it really underlines our unworthiness compared to God, that no matter who we are we're still not good enough for God and how knowing this, God still reaches out to us. I had never thought of it that way before and it was a really cool insight! I was feverishly writing it down as she was talking :) But really, it's so true - we're not good enough for God, but through *His* pursuing *us* and giving us the greatest gift in the sacrifice of His Son He made a way for us to come to Him and receive true and eternal LIFE!!! So amazing to think about!! That God cared that much about every single one of us that He initiated His Son coming down to us as God incarnate and giving us a way to know Him personally!! wow, I say again, WOW!! God is so good!!!

So next week we will be talking about the importance of community through "God's Facebook Network." Week 3 is "Does God change His status?" asking the question, "is God even involved in our lives? Does He care?" and we will end with "God wants to see your whole profile" with the idea being that just like how on Facebook you can "hide" certain aspects of your profile from certain people, God does not want that - He wants ALL of us, not just part of us. I'm excited for next week and what I'll learn from the students!


and with that, here is the funny of the day - whoever comes up with these espn and college gameday commercials is a genius and I love it!!