I have an “on again/off again” relationship with Facebook. I was slow to establish a Facebook profile after many of my friends had embraced the site as a way to share information. Initially, I set up a Facebook account for the sole purpose of accessing my nephew’s reports of his travels. He was posting reports and pictures and I wanted to keep up with what was going on in his life. I decided that I didn’t care what number of “friends” I had on Facebook, so I made it a policy to not ask anyone to be my Facebook Friend. I also decided that I would not accept friend requests from people I did not know. I’ve not quite kept to that practice, as I have requested to be a Facebook friend of folks with whom I am friends outside of Facebook on occasion.

Nonetheless I find myself looking at Facebook nearly every day. I have the application on my phone and I’ll often look at my newsfeed when I have a few odd moments of waiting.

The Covid pandemic is the event that got me to start using Facebook. When people began to isolate to prevent the spread of the disease, there were many with whom Facebook was the easiest way to maintain contact. Then we made the decision to use Facebook live as the vehicle for broadcasting our worship services. I had no experience with broadcasting worship and needed to come up with solutions for getting worship to our congregation on a very short notice. Facebook was already set up to make broadcasting fairly easy. Like a lot of congregations across the world, we began to offer services over Facebook live. Early in the pandemic, before I retired, it became clear that once we started to broadcast, there was no going back. There were some people with whom we were connecting via Facebook who we would miss were we to stop.

I made the shift into retirement, moved, and became involved in a different congregation, where we also use Facebook live for worship. This new congregation has been more conservative in allowing face-to-face gatherings and is currently in a three-week online only phase of our life together. Between Facebook and Zoom we are conducting all of the business of the church. I’m getting fairly adept at the use of both platforms.

Through Facebook I get news of a lot of people with whom I probably would not have much contact. I’ve joined a group from the town where I grew up, and I occasionally will post in a group of my former high school classmates that was started on the occasion of our 50th class reunion.

Facebook, however, is not a perfect way of keeping up with all of my friends. I’ve noticed that many of my friends have cut back on their Facebook posts and their reading of Facebook. Some have been clear that this has been caused by offensive and inaccurate posts that they have read. Others have simply wanted to free up time that they were spending on screen and have eliminate Facebook as a way to make time available for other things that are more important.

Yesterday I learned that a friend had passed away more than a month ago and I hadn’t heard about it at the time. I had simply missed the news of his death. We have plenty of friends in common, even a number of Facebook friends in common. Somehow posts about him hadn’t shown up in my feed and I hadn’t searched for news about him. We had both moved during the pandemic to be closer to our children and his illness had prevented him from using social media as a channel to keep in touch.

Years ago a similar pattern of slow traveling of news would have been common. People who traveled or who moved across several states lost contact with friends in their old home. Some letters were exchanged, but news traveled slowly and some news just didn’t get through. These days, however, we expect to be able to keep up with events going on in distant places and to be able to access our friends through a variety of media.

I am not dismayed that there was a lag in my learning of his death. I knew that he was suffering from terminal illness. I knew that he was likely to die. Our relationship was such that we enjoyed each other when we were able to get together and often went long periods of time without a conversation even when we lived in the same town. We initially met because of the activities of our children and our children have grown up and moved out into the world. For a while his father and my father-in-law lived in the same retirement community and we’d see each other when visiting there. But our parents have passed away and our visits to that facility ceased. We continued to meet at events in our community on occasion until first I and then he moved away from our town. It seems natural that we have drifted apart.

When we were together, we had three topics that were most common for our conversations. We’d talk about our children, about paddling, and tell stories about his younger brother who was also a friend of mine. After I received news of his death, I looked up his obituary and realized that I had lost contact not only with him, but also with his brother. Even all of our technologies cannot prevent us from growing apart from people with whom we once were close.

In my new home, I’m making lots of new friends, but I also have relationships with people whom I’ve known for many years that are important to me. I don’t want to have to give up prior relationships in order to establish new ones.

The experience reminds me that I need to use different media to keep track of my friends. Facebook works for some. It doesn’t for others. And, when I am talking with my friends, I need to ask about other friends. We’re all in this life together. And, as I have once again learned from my friend, life is short. I hope I can succeed in spending less of my life with my smartphone and more in genuine conversation with real people, even if it means I’ll miss some of the news.