Love hopes all things, but I’m still hitting the ‘Unfriend’ button

Over the past month or two I have been making a renewed effort to engage in good faith political discussions my Facebook friends. I had been hoping that since the election was over and there are a handful of key points that are very obviously matters of fact, maybe I could reason with my friends through those topics.

1 Corinthians says that love hopes all things, and my rationale went along these lines: I love these people, and I hope that eventually their eyes could be opened to the truth rather than the lies they’ve been chasing. My engaging and speaking truth could be a pathway toward that realization for them. After all, if everybody who disagrees with them just gives up and disengages, the echo chambers just get worse, right?

It’s been an exhausting month. Maybe I’m just really bad at this. Maybe people are far more entrenched in lies than I wanted to believe. Maybe Facebook is really not a good platform for those conversations. But whatever the case, I got nowhere with my arguments, got called a bunch of names, and my stress level went through the roof every time I was inexorably drawn to tap the Facebook app icon.

So last night enough was enough. I went through Facebook and unfriended a bunch of people who aren’t really in-person friends, and unfollowed a whole bunch of people who I do know in person. I still love these people and pray and hope that their eyes would be opened, but this can’t be the way. At least I hope that if they someday reach a point where they see things differently and want someone to talk to about it, they’ll remember me as someone who’s willing to talk.