My wife posted an Easter picture of our family last week on Facebook that went viral. Ok, viral is a relative term when you only have a couple hundred friend connections. Her post collected over 120 likes in a few days. My wife is famous to me, but outside of our friends and family, she’s not a celebrity. She doesn’t usually get that kind of attention from her posts.
For me, it caught me off guard to see names from the past respond to the picture. People I have not talked to since high school responded. My wife saw names like or comment she, too, hasn’t crossed paths with in years. In all the pictures and posts over the last decade of Facebook, why now?
I will say, it’s a great picture. We intended to take a formal family shot, but my daughters had other ideas. One girl proudly salutes the camera like a sailor. The other scratches our heads with a cartoonish expression that says, “Best of luck getting me to be serious!” Shannon and I both lost all ability to maintain formal composure. We bursted with laughter.
Facebook feels like the ultimate social experiment. It’s almost to say, if you put all of your friends in one great big dining hall, what would you want to share? All the while knowing that while they are in your room, they are also in their own banquet hall with all of their friends.
The type of conversations and connections possible abound, and I am always curious to see what status posts get responses and what posts simply fade into cyberspace never to be seen or noticed again.
There’s the nature or traveling posts, like phone shots of rainbows and rainy days or the “Hey everyone, look at me next to the Eiffel Tower while you’re back home at work!”.
There’s the recommendation posts: “Hey, does anyone know a good plumber who can respond NOW to my flooding toilet”.
There’s the “Thanks all for the birthday wishes” messages.
How about the sports posts- right now Nashville wants to celebrate the hockey series win over our evil Chicago rivals.
What makes one post warrant more attention than another? I pondered this as I considered my wife’s post this week.
It is the power of presence, I think.
As I scroll through other posts, it appears direct face shots tend to receive the most response. I don’t mean shameless selfies. The pictures where people let their face be seen in an authentic presence draw us most. These do not ask for attention but simply share: This is me. This is us.
And people respond with likes, comments, and emotions.
We are so lonely, in a good way even, for a face to encounter our own.
Our face holds our presence, reflects our very heart. When shame arises, our face shows it first. Our we hide our face. We look down and away. We divert our attention. We wear a hat or put on sunglasses. Sometimes we don’t even take them off indoors.
We run from our own face. We present the face we want to be seen, and conceal the face we deem unworthy or unwanted.
That Saturday we took the picture, we caught a wonderful moment of joy. By that time, our kids had eaten lunch and three scoops of ice cream. They had bags full of plastic eggs with treasures and various candies inside. The day was finally fun. If you had seen us hours before, though, you would have seen two kids who hated life and two parents fearful we were failing at raising children.
If only someone had snapped that picture and my wife had posted it to Facebook…
You know what? I think twice as many people would have clicked “like”. Not because anyone would take pleasure in our misery. It would be because in capturing the hard parts of life, one struggling heart might look into the face of another and say, “I am not alone. That is me. That is us.”
