Yesterday morning my kids were working on their math at the table when I overheard this conversation:

Bailey: I hate math! Subtraction is so hard.

Brad: You think that's hard? Take a look at this. (He then shows her the equation that he is trying to solve. n - 12 = 925-907) He points at the variable and says, "I have to figure out what this is."

Bailey: (Looking at him in sheer amazement) Uh, Brad? It's a lowercase n.

So nice that she got to feel smarter than her brother, at least for a moment!

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Let's talk about Facebook. Some of you may have no frame of reference for this because you've never gone there. But others of you are probably like me, and spend more time there than you care to actually admit.

Facebook is a fun way to keep up with what's going on in the lives of your friends and family. For instance, they might post a status that says they are headed to the beach and you can be happy for them (or insanely jealous, whatever the case may be.) Or they might post a status about their frustration over something in the news. Or they might post something about being overwhelmed, or in a place of trusting God or something similar to that. If you know them well, you may know what they are talking about and it reminds you to stop and say a prayer for them right then.

Facebook is also a place to reconnect with people from your past, many of whom you may not have seen or talked to in decades. This is the part I've been thinking about lately. It's amazing how sometimes you'll reconnect with a person and just pick right up where you left off, as if you just spoke to them the other day. Those are the fun ones. For me, however, those are few and far between.

There's another group of folks that you were acquaintances with, and once you've said hello and sort of done a mini catch-up on where they are in life, there's nothing left to say. And then there's the friend requests that you receive and you look at the picture and name and think, "I have no idea who this person is. None." You wonder, do they really remember me? What was I to them? Am I a complete jerk for not knowing them? You can go down this path of self-condemnation for as long as you like, although that's probably just because I'm a girl. You are then faced with the dilemma of accepting their friend request so you don't seem mean and opening up your stuff to someone you don't know, or ignoring them and feeling like a snob. I'm sensitive about feeling like a snob, but I usually do it anyway.

But recently I've discovered that Facebook has a lot of power, for both good and evil. Let's do good first. I was discussing this with a friend yesterday, and she was telling me a story about reconnecting with a friend that she had lost in college. They had been best friends in high school and had some sort of major fall-out in college that led to the annihilation of the duo. She has regretted losing that relationship ever since. When she learned that her former friend was on Facebook, she immediately sent her a message asking for forgiveness over the way their friendship had ended. Her friend readily accepted, and a broken relationship has now been restored all these many years later. That is an amazing story of redemption.

But I experienced something so bizarre the other day. After reconnecting with an old friend, I suddenly began to feel some old feelings of insecurity. It was someone I always felt intimidated around and always felt the need to impress. I was stunned at how quickly those feelings came back. It's been almost 18 years since I graduated from high school. I've come a really long way from the person I was then. I truly have found my identity in Christ and feel confident in the person that God made me to be. So why was I suddenly transported back to being a teenage girl and all of the insecurity that goes along with that?

I think it's the power of the wounds that haunt us. I have spent a lot of time with God examining things in my past that were the catalyst for certain behavior patterns and aspects of my personality. A lot of those are painful memories, even though on the surface I have lived a pretty charmed life. But the spoken word can be so cruel. All of you can remember something that was said to you during childhood that hurt you so deeply you have never forgotten it. Even if it wasn't intentional, the scar still remains. If you never go back and invite Jesus to heal that place, it has the potential to fester until it becomes an infection that permeates your very being. But we can talk more about that another day.

For now, what to do about Facebook? For me, I just have to remember that my identity is not wrapped up in who I was at any stage over the past 35 years. It is wrapped up in who I am in Christ. Thankfully, I can rest in the knowledge that no matter how I may feel today, Someone thinks I'm a princess and loves me with an everlasting love that will never fail and is completely unmerited so it can't be lost. Thank God for that!

I'm off to update my status...