Every so often I get the following type of email in my box:
Hello Dear, My name is miss Ann Daniel I saw your Email profile today I will like to know more about you. Please if you would not mind kindly get back to me so that we can know each other better, I shall send my picture to you when i receive your good response in my email box, Note: distance, age, race or religion is no hindrance to true love and friendship, I will be waiting to hear from you soonest, Ann
The return email is usually from Hotmail and the grammar is never any better. The messages are never lewd, but they do make me sad, not of course because “Ann” exists, I am sure she does not, but that there is a certain kind of man that would answer her email. There must be or they would not be sent. I know that friends my age get such things and I wonder who responds. I look inside my own soul and I fear the answer:
The fool and his intimacy are soon parted.
I think there must be many men who never hear, really hear, terms of endearment. “Ann” (I will continue as if she is a person and not a spambot) does not use my name, but she does project gentle affection. Eroticism is so widely available on the Net that a gentle word must tempt the lonely gentleman. He knows that it is a spambot, but he hopes it is not.
This hope is a fraud and not a virtue, but we are not taught very much about hope. The Christian virtue of hope seeks to grow into faith and for this growth it needs substance. Faith is not certainty, but faith has reasons. Hope without faith can believe anything: even that the Ann was attracted by my “email profile.”
I still do not know what my email profile is or why it would be found attractive. (“You are just attracted to me for my cunning email address,” said no breakup ever.) You are wrong as well about so much of what would hinder any relationship.
Sadly, distance is a hindrance to true love and friendship. Every so often people should meet because people are people partly through their bodies. It matters that I am fifty-one, have sore knees, and am a guy. I can never forget the privileges and the hindrances of my physical nature and so deeper friendship must conquer distance somehow. Email will not be enough in the end and I already have too many distant family and friends.
Age is a hindrance to true love and friendship. I am too old to be a real “friend” to anyone too much younger than myself. A friend is a peer and I am in the youth of old age. As a result, if you are too old or (worse) too young, we will have too little in common to be friends. I will laugh at things you do not find funny or turn foolish trying to grasp your time.
“Race” should not be a barrier since “race” is a figment of the crazed modern mind. Love can conquer our evil notions.
Religion is a a great barrier to true love and friendship because religion contains a man’s deepest beliefs about reality. If a man’s professed religion does not hinder love, then his real religion may be the worship of Aphrodite and nobody should worship Aphrodite. Ask Paris, better, ask Troy. I worship Jesus as God and His love constrains me, even when I wish it did not.
Finally, Ann, I am married. I am not (I am sure) always attractive to my wife Hope, but I am married to her and so I must wait for certain kindnesses from her or not get them at all. If I do not, then I will not. Nothing good has ever come of anything else.
I also have great and good friends and I am committed to them. They too are kind and tender to me and that too is the fruit of decades. When all of them fail me or I fail them, then we must all be patient and look to God: the spouse who never fails and the friend who is closer than a brother.
There is also the staggeringly probability that good might come of writing. A friendship might begin through an email and a picture: it happened when I started corresponding with Phillip E. Johnson, now the dearest of mentors, but it is rare. At my age I have settled “love” and “friendship” and must invest in the relationships I have.
Isn’t that a glory of growing old? Of course, there are lonely people out there. I am sometimes lonely myself (despite friends and family) and so I can feel the temptation to find a friend. . . more friends. . .stocking them up against the dark times. And yet this was too easy, Ann, and that makes me distrust you even if you are not a spambot. I am not (I fear) as my “email profile” makes me seem.
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