Spaced Out On My Space

It’s official. I have 14 friends. And one of them isn’t Tom. If you don’t know anything about My Space, that last sentence didn’t make any sense. Let me explain.

Until recently, the only thing I had heard about My Space is that perverts and weirdoes use it to snatch our children on the internet. So I was a bit surprised when one of our youth leaders told me that My Space is a good place to talk to young people in our church. My motto is that I’ll try most anything once as long as it’s not illegal, immoral or fattening, and I’m flexible on that last one. Plus, even though I’m 186 days away from my 50th birthday, I like to think I can still function in this cyber world of ours. I can dial a cell phone. I’m the VCR expert in our house. So armed with this high tech knowledge, I took my trusty laptop and ventured into My Space. If you have a computer and your computer is internet friendly, (some are internet hostile) my address is

http://www.myspace.com/BobLaver

For the computer illiterate, here is a beginner’s guide to My space. My Space is like a huge, cyber bulletin board on steroids. It’s easy, kind of fun. It has about 10 million commercials, but it’s free. It has a place where you can put a picture of yourself.
You can state your name. You can put in a fake name, your dogs name. (Or your dog’s picture.) I’ve seen cartoons, baby pictures, pictures of cars, boats, or you name it. It’s there.

There is a spot where you can tell about yourself. On my page, it is called. “Bob’s Details.” Here are my details.

My status is married. (As opposed to single, or a nut case)
I’m here for friends (opposed to being a nut case)
My religion is Christian (Not Buddhist or something else)
Zodiac sign (hey I put in my birthday and it came up automatically)
Children: I’m a proud parent (they didn’t have spaced out parent)
Education: post grad. (It’s better than Dr. Bob in cyber space.)
Occupation: Preacher. (That ought to freak out some folks!)

There are charts where you can fill in your views on movies, music, current events and anything else you can think of. People fill in true answers, funny answers, made up answers. You can search the thousands of people on My Space to find a specific person if you know their email. Or you can browse and look at a couple of million strangers to learn what we already know. There are some weird and interesting people in this world.

The key to my space is friends. When you sign up, you automatically get one friend. His name is Tom. Rumor has it that Tom is the technical advisor to My Space. When you get a friend, you can send a message, email or picture to them, or delete them. I deleted Tom. (Most people do) I wanted to delete my third grade teacher, but I can’t find her yet. How do you find friends? I wanted to talk to people in our church, youth group, summer camp, etc. You have to go through another friend to find friends. Rob Cummings and Chuck Knight are my technical advisors, so I went to their pages, and their pages have pictures of their friends. I can click on the picture of a person and go to their page. Some pages have security features so that you can only be a friend to view the page (great thing for kids) you then ask the person if they want to be your friend. They can approve or deny. There are some weirdo’s out there. I’ve had a few try to contact me. You can approve or deny them.

Surfing through My Space is like walking through a cow pasture. It can be fun, helpful and relaxing, but if you don’t watch where you are going, you can step in something you really don’t want to be involved in. It’s a great tool to chat with people in the church, young people and camp people. I’ve been told my page is sort of dull and it is because I don’t spend a lot of time fixing it up. Some people have fantastic looking pages. You can learn a lot about someone by viewing their My Space page. It’s cool doing ministry in cyberspace.

In the era B.C. (Before Computers) Jesus Christ had a My Space page. It’s called the cross. He was posted up there for the entire world to see. Because of His death on the cross, God invites us to be His friend. (2 Cor 5:21)

If you are on My Space, click on my picture and be my friend. More importantly, you don’t need a computer to click on Jesus and be His Friend forever.

He’s better than Tom any day!