Drumroll, please… The Word of the Year for 2009, according to The New Oxford American Dictionary, is ‘unfriend.’
Really? Unbelievable! In today’s craze of social media and networking and everybody trying to add more and more friends to their pages everyday, the word of the year means deleting friends.
What? Are we 3 years old again? In my classroom of 3-4 year olds, when a group of students are playing together and something doesn’t go just as one student wants, he says “you’re not my friend” and immediately another student says “we’re all friends; right, Ms. Brenna.”
It’s true. We are all friends. We may not always agree with everything our friends do or say, but we are still friends. It is too easy to ‘unfriend’ a person. I guess unfriending is the social media version of divorce.
We need to use the ‘talk it out’ method like in my early childhood classroom — 2 students sitting face-to-face talking it out until they come to a conclusion of how to work out their differences -at that age they usually end up changing the subject and forget all about what caused their ‘unfriending’ issues. The same thing probably happens more than once with social media unfriending situations. The 2 feuding parties probably unfriend each other one week then friend one another again the next week.
What would Jesus do? Remember the song, I am a Friend of God? Would He unfriend us? Of course not!
