A Global Community

When my great-grandparents left the north of Germany and immigrated to the south of Brazil in the early 1870s, they said goodbye to their parents and other relatives, never to see them again. Since then, communication and transportation have improved significantly, and they have become more affordable.

And the cyber revolution completely changed the way we connect with others. On October 28, 2003, Harvard University student Mark E. Zuckerberg, with the help of three of his classmates, released a new website called Facemash.

Zuckerberg hacked into Harvard’s security network and copied student ID images used by dormitories and posted them two by two, allowing visitors to choose who of the two was “hot” and who was “not.” Then on February 4, 2004, at Harvard, Zuckerberg launched the Facebook social network.

The next month, it expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale and, eventually, to the whole world. On January 28, 2015, Timothy Stenovec wrote the headline, “Facebook Is Now Bigger Than the Largest Country on Earth.” At that time, the network had 1.39 billion people logging in each month to scroll their News Feeds, communicate with friends and look at photos. That’s more than the entire population of China... which [is] estimated to have 1.36 billion people.55 Our modern world has become a huge global community. Some of the loneliness caused by geographic distance and physical separation has decreased due to social media. Instead of saying goodbye forever to family and friends, as Paul did in Acts 20:37, 38, we can suggest, “Let’s keep in touch while I’m gone.” Through Facebook and other social networks, we may even find old friends and reconnect with them. As Adventist Christians who believe in Christ’s soon return, we can use social media to share Jesus as we socialize. I suggest we develop creative ways of shortening the distance between our friends and our Savior, Jesus Christ. Think about how you could do it!