Come, Let Me Give You One "Like"

We are now living in a popular culture where our generation of people constantly seek short-term recognition and gratification of success. We want things fast, we put in effort to make something work, and we want results fast. Unfortunately more often than not, success often require us to wait. It takes time and persistance. Our generation of people often find this hard to accept, because we are pampered with products that give us instant results. We also demand tangible and visible result, often something that we can brag about, something that we can share with other and hoping they would give us the attention that somehow became a necessity for us to continue to exist. That is why our generation of people gives up easily, because we are impatient to see result and we can't persevere long enough to see success.

Facebook grabbed hold of this hunger, and now the most popular online money-making machine for Mark Zuckerberg. Remember how we post up photos and status, and we keep hitting the "Refresh" button to see if anyone has commented or "liked" the photo. We get superbly excited to see the red mark on the top-right corner of the page. All of the sudden, how much "Like" you get became important (as much as we would deny it). How we promote ourselves became important. Here, we can dictate which angle other people should look at us, often the best angle.

Now, I cannot comment nor criticize this. I can merely state what's really happening. I'm part of this too. I have to admit, I fall short of the same thing. Often enough I seek recognition on Facebook when I felt defeated, ignored and rejected in the real world.

I write this to encourage the Christian Fellowship Committee, because over the last few planning retreat, it was obvious to me that we all look to the wrong direction. As we plan, number of participation seems to always be our aim. Especially in the last retreat, we all feel defeated and disappointed because the response from the members in the past semester had not been up to our expectation. We lose our perspective so much that we forgot one important thing to do during the retreat: to give thanks.

Lately, I've been constantly posting up devotional material along with some of my writings and thoughts, hoping that it would somehow inspire the members to do their devotion. (At the same time, to give me a reason to constantly do my own devotion.) As I scroll down the Facebook group, all I could see is my posts, yet there are hardly any "Like" given. For that instant it made me felt like I'm posting these up so much that the members are annoyed and decided to turn off that notification. It felt more discouraging when I open up the event pages that we created to notify our members about coming Wednesday meetings and activities, there are hardly 10 member who responded.

At that moment, I felt like giving up. Really. What's the point of staying awake at 2am to do my devotion just so I won't miss a day on encouraging them to do theirs? What's the point of thinking and rephrasing all my writings when no one actually give a damn? What's the point anyway?

However, in that stir of frustration and disappointment, yet I heard a timely reminder. "What are you truly seeking? God or man?" It was a "light-up" moment. I've been focusing so much on people's responses to my encouragement and invitation, I lose focus on the reason why I'm doing devotion and planning activities. Well, I do devotion because I want to spend time with God, I want to grow spiritually. Posting the devotion up was just merely a side-product of that desire to grow with others. Well, I spend my energy, youth and time planning those activities because that was my calling to His service and I'm doing just as I'm called to. The participation is God's to decide, because it is God who bring them there.

So, I want to encourage you, to stay focus on what's truly important: God Himself. So let's not give up doing our calling and fulfilling our service. We invite them anyway, if they reject, we keep inviting them; if they do not come, we run the activity anyway, because God meant the activity for the few who attends, and it's for them only; we post up devotional material, if they choose to ignore it, we post it anyway, because God meant it for the few who need those timely reminder. For the sake of God and the few, we SHALL NOT GIVE UP.

Now, give me a "LIKE!", and Christ will give you "LIFE!"