So I signed on to facebook today, and saw a friend of mine from back east, Dave, was signed on as well and I messaged him to see how he was.  He told me he was in a big mess and needed help.  (Sit back, this is a long story.) I asked him what was up, and he said he was in London on vacation and had been robbed at gunpoint in a park by his hotel, and was now at the airport trying to get home.  I said, "What?!" (Pretty witty, huh?) At the same time another friend of mine hit me with a message and I just casually told him I was dealing with Dave in a crisis situation, and Tom said, wait a minute, I was just chatting with him to, I think this is a scam, that it's not really him.  "Really?" says I (I'm a regular Mark Twain as i chat.) So i called Dave to see what was up, and here he's in Ohio, going to work, and not stuck in London and had not been robbed and his facebook account had been compromised. So I go back to "Dave" who is still chatting with me and ask him what happened, and he said that he had been robbed and his right leg was hurt real bad.  So I said (honest, I really did write this) "I thought your right leg was your prosthetic leg. Or was that your left?"  Well, he ignored that and went for my money, so I told him I just just talked to Dave and I was pretty sure that neither he nor any of his friends would be helping him.  Found out later he had been chatting with lots of people trying to cam them out of money.)

Now besides the obvious lesson about the potential dangers of identity theft and being careful of facebook scams, let me make a really outrageous connection here to what we've been talking about as far as genuine community goes.  I wonder (are you ready for this) how often the person we're chatting with, even when we're standing there face to face with them, isn't really the person we're chatting with.  Does that need some explaining?  Are we really seeing the real person, the real Dave, the genuine article, or we seeing hat the other person wants us to see, the fake Dave, a front because the other person doesn't really want us to know who he really is.

Or, to put it on the other foot, are we trying to scam people with a false identity, because we don't really want them to know the real us?  Masks, false identities, even identity theft (trying to be someone we're not--hey, this is really a pretty good illustration after all!), we all do this to some extent.  And we might pull it off for a while, but it isn't long till others are posting the truth, beware,  we're a fake.

We need real relationships, places where we can be us--the real us--accepted and included and loved just as we are.  Because it's there, in those kinds of relationships that real transformation and healing takes place.  That's what we're after at Oasis.  No more scamming, no more masks, just a group immersed in the grace of God.

I'm not sure whatever happened to "Dave." he unfriended me as soon as I let him know I had seen through him....hmmm, maybe there's some parallel to how we handle relationships there too. Another time!