Lessons learned from Facebook

Admittedly I was the last person in my house to establish a Facebook account.  I fought against it as if it would shorten my life because I moved into the 21st century. However, October of 2009, I joined the social media family and established my facebook account.  No my world did not end, I did not break out in hives and the world continued to rotate on its axis, however my family did throw a party,( kidding).  I was like a kid in a candy store that first month, I was finding friends from High School who I had lost touch with, family members who I have not seen in some time, it was GREAT!! I even got addicted to some of the games that are on Facebook, but we won't talk about that  ((smile)).  Over time, because of the addition of family members that were newly discovered, all my High School friends and all of my gaming friends I had a very large amount of Facebook friends.  You know how it is, you're online playing a game and chatting with a fellow players of a game and you find you have a lot in common, no I don't mean romantically, but they are really nice and funny people.  Whether you meet them in person or not looses some of its importance because there is the connection with the other person(s). 
So you ask, what does all that have to do with Lessons learned from Facebook? The most outstanding lesson I have learned from Facebook, is that there are some truly wonderful people in the world today.  But the lesson that I learned the most about myself, my friends and my family was difficult but valuable.  During a very hard time in my small immediate family, I reached out to my best friend, because his counsel is always excellent, he suggested I reach out to my family members to see if they could help us out.  Now understand this, I am not one to ask for help, or push my problems on other people, I always think I can handle it on my own, and there are times when we all need help.  Well, I put my pride aside and reached out to family (that would be blood relatives) and friends to see if we could get the help we needed. I come from a large family so I had many people to turn to or at least that is what I thought.  To my utter surprise no one in my family(the blood relatives) members had anything to say with one exception a distant cousin did let me know that that branch of the family was going through a hard time themselves.  No one else, not one of my three sisters, or my three brothers said a word and as a matter of fact one of my brothers defriended me on Facebook, I was in shock and really hurt by this rejection.  But on the other side of that coin, are the friends that I reached out to to assist my family and I during this hard time they stepped up and said yes we will do what we can.  You could have knocked me over with a feather the way they stepped up and offered what they could.  The lesson learned from Facebook is that real family is not always just your blood relatives many times it is the people who have come into your life as a friend without any expectations or demands.  They show you what a real family does for each other, through the good and the bad times.  Thank you Facebook for the lessons you have taught me.