To my facebook friends who are also mylot friends

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I deleted my facebook account a few weeks ago and have worried that those of you here, who were also my friends there, may have wondered why. I did appreciate all of you included me on your friends list there but I just had to close that account. In my congregation is has been suggested that we need to be careful how we use the computer. Now mind you, they are not saying that the computer or even the internet is bad, but that it has the potential for abuse because you can access it in the privacy of your own home. Many people are getting involved in immoral activities on the web to the detriment of their family life. Hence the warning. It is especially difficult for young people to resist the lure of some of the things that go on in the world wide web so the counsel was more specific when it came to what children should be allowed to access. Social networking sites were high on the list of things our young people were encouraged to avoid. You have to admit that there are people on these sites just trolling for young inexperienced children to exploit. Imagine my surprise, then, to find a friend request from a young teenage girl from my congregation that I consider a close friend and very spiritually minded. She, of course, still lives with her parents who are also very spiritually minded and I was sure they had no idea that she had a facebook page. I spent several days thinking about this situation while I let her request sit there without a response. I considered several courses of action but in the end I decided that the best thing to do was to remove myself from there. Perhaps she thought that because I had a page there the site was safe. For me it was fine because I have experience and maturity. But for a young person it was a disaster waiting for a place to happen. This experience did highlight the fact that our actions affect others around us and if we care about the type of example we set for others we must think about our choices and not just jump in and do whatever we want. Even though doing something may not be wrong we might want to consider how doing it would affect others who saw us. Have you ever done something that had a negative impact on someone else even though it wasn't wrong? Did you feel guilty? Do you like peanut butter with your chocolate?