Reunions are often awkward events perpetuated by either 1) academic tradition or 2) the one crazy aunt in the family who believes in fairies and forced family bonding (and yes, reunions are almost always planned by women). Such events may be fading as the notion of corralling physical bodies into a common room is being supplanted by the notion of corralling virtual people into a common network.

If you’re a Millennial (born since 1980), you will never know what it feels like to re-discover your past life during that first week of Facebook frenzy. I mean, when a fourteen year-old signs up for his first FB account, he’s flooded with the man-sized responsibility of choosing his network from among his already fixed social milieu; his friends haven’t changed much from yesterday’s “X-Men are the bomb!” status to today’s “Eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.” But when a Gen-Xer climbs into the saddle, he discovers that the Facebook trailhead is neither linear nor simple; rather, he finds all sorts of hidden trails leading to dark, shadowy places in his past—the high school stomachaches, the college apostates, the awkward career moves, the Ghosts of Churches Past.

The older you are, the more that Facebook blows your mind. Not the look-at-this-freaking-technological-marvel kind of mind-blowing, but the kind that makes you see just how complex are the journeys that you and your relationships have taken. Now of course, if you still go to the same church, in the same town, with the same hairstyle, with the same friends then you’re not apt to find this experiment particularly fascinating, However, if you’ve journeyed along figurative and literal trails into new territories, then you know what it’s like to linger over someone’s profile, wander into albums, listen to the tone behind the status updates, and wonder how he or she impossibly got from A to B.

Gen X-ers get those unexpected inbox messages that might say something like this: Hey You! Haven’t seen you in years! So what’s new? What do we say to the insanely truncated question, “What’s new?” Do we tell them about the horrific doubt in 1987 or the year we took pills, the glorious Sunday our firstborn child was baptized? Do we summarize the months of sexual drought with an angry spouse, the Year of the New Hobby, that one weekend in the mountains when we heard God speak? We can’t waste their time by sharing how we painted our bedroom a different color or landed in the hospital with a urinary infection or bought and sold a crummy fishing boat, can we?

So we collapse all of life’s complexities and trivialities into a few easy sentences and make sure our thumbnail picture misrepresents the long ride we took from high school cliques to Gen X clicks. No one can really know another person’s journey, especially the spiritual part, the part that gets to the heart and soul of a man. I may enjoy having 338 friends right now, but I might only be able to climb into the soul of a few. Those who know me the least know only the better parts of me (Vacation to Maui! Andrew’s Birthday!), but those who know me best, know the very worst. And the last I checked, I didn’t post an album for that.

I begin to see a little more how absurd it must be for God to watch us explain our lives in shorthand. Solomon writes that Whatever exists has already been named, and what man IS has been known as if to say, “Dude, don’t try to explain God’s sovereignty. He’s got you so figured out.” Still, we tried to connect some of the dots, recognizing how God takes simple people and gives them beautiful layers, while taking complicated people and making them children again. Face-to-face conversations bring glory to Jesus Christ and his transforming power—in short, the sort of reunion that really matters.

Facebook and I have been friends for more than a year now. He is ruthlessly phony and takes ridiculous shortcuts with relationships. Even so, I won’t cut him loose—at least for now. His technical wizardry enables me to get to those face-to-face conversations where relationships can grow in real time, where fellowship is much better than thumbnail photos.