Swipe right.
Swipe left.
Matches.
I don’t know any of these terms. I met Alycia the old fashioned way. I’m not averse to online dating. In fact I thought about setting up an E-Harmony profile on a youth group night and getting input from the students. Before I got to that point, though, I met Alycia and didn’t have to navigate the waters of online dating.
I know plenty of people who met their spouses online and have wonderful marriages. Life is busy and not everyone has the time to meet people, go on dates and find his or her soul mate. And while apps like Tinder aren’t necessarily about finding a soul make, they do bring people together.
For the past few weeks I have seen a billboard about bringing people together, but not to find a soul mate. It’s for Bumble, a dating app that has apparently added a friendship feature. Now instead of meeting a friend at church, at work or in your neighborhood, we can now find our BFF in the palm of our hand.
I have two BFFs. They were the best men at my wedding and I met them a long time ago through church. I’m blessed to have the friends in my life that I do and I don’t know what I would do without them. If I didn’t have friends like I do, then I would be willing to try anything to find them.
If I’m not opposed to online dating, then I can’t be opposed to online friend finding. I think it’s awesome that some company is using technology to meet one of our deepest needs.
We were created to be in relationships and not just marriage relationships. The Bible is filled with examples of friends benefitting from each other, which is significantly better than friends with benefits. We need people who will magnify life’s joys and help carry us through its burdens. God wired us that way and we should swipe any way we need to in order to find those friends.
The most important component to finding friends like that is being a friend like that. If we want to find friends who are trustworthy, loyal, fun and engaging, then we need to do our best to exhibit those qualities as well. I’m far from perfect, but I really try to be a good friend. Sometimes that means sitting down and having a hard conversation and other times it means celebrating for days.
God created us for deep, amazing friendships. Where we find those friendships doesn’t matter.
How did you find your friends?
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