About 100 days ago I went Facebook silent. In other words, I haven’t spoken to or read anything from Facebook since the beginning of the year (so if anyone received a friend request from me during that time, it wasn’t really me). I must admit that the silence originally had more to do with exorcising other people’s demons from my life than my own but I cleverly wrapped my intensions into a period of yearly fasting designed by my church. I gave up several things all at one time; some dietary, some social, and for the most part I went easy on myself, but at the end of the scheduled 21 days of fasting, God identified social media as the idol that I was most wastefully abusing.
As I approached the end of my initial commitment the anticipation of burgers and barbecue seemed a trivial reward; unnecessary fanfare for a moderate sacrifice with little purpose; an over dramatization of half-hearted surrender and nothing that moderation would not have rendered irrelevant. To resume my former diet at the same undisciplined pace would have had little to do with sacrifice, rather it would have been a blatant disregard for physical laws that would ultimately lead to a day of reckoning just beyond my immediate horizon. I got that part! But God insisted that 21 days was not enough time away from unregulated passive social interaction for me to understand how much this intrusive medium interfered with potential quiet time and potential personal conversations; how it allowed for irresponsible commenting and merciless piling on; how it allowed passive aggressive messaging through misdirection and silence. So He demanded more time with me in order to highlight how wrong my approach was to its use.
With an emphasis on peace He exposed every rabbit hole social media had opened and pinpointed my every failure to avoid going down them. The fresh feeling of disconnection was the liberating shower I needed to give me a better view of my own entanglement. It freed me, temporarily, from the constant bombardment of dissatisfaction wrapped in disappointment fed by mistreatment, misunderstanding and rage I regularly consumed. It released me from the subtle pull of social cheering and protests and the ups and downs of monitoring world temperament in search of agreement, or looking for a fight. Undoing the tentacles of random outside noise God identified each voice as a human with a need for contact, and He held me there to raise a basic question about whether I was hearing the voice or adding to the noise. Then He sent me a friend request! My freedom from entanglement short-lived, He wrapped me in a purpose beyond expressing my own brand of alternating celebration and sour grapes, bragging and whining. He acknowledged the brokenness and called me out along with everyone who uses His name to identify themselves as a “good person”. Not to get them off Facebook, not to avoid angry despondent people, not to beat them over the head with personal wrath disguised as God’s wrath, but to hear the voices of the broken and to respond as if God were a Facebook friend who regularly read your posts (because He does you know).
A lot has taken place in this hundred days and I return to Facebook with a sense of caution and respect. I have probably missed out on many people’s life experiences, both good and bad, and I offer my congratulations and condolences, my thank yous and apologies to anyone who may have felt ignored or slighted but forgive me if I don’t try to catch up. My absence has clarified, for me, the level God will go to infuse Himself into every aspect of our lives. Being absent gave me 100 days to calibrate my focus on Him and it released me from the round-the-clock drama percolating in the world. I gave God the first 100 days He’s given me this year and He honored them with 100 days of peace, vision, and confirmation. 100 days off Facebook is not the cure for the chasm between God and man it’s just a symbolic cure God used to make me aware that I was distracted.
“Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!” Psalm 46:10 (NKJV)
Photo credit to Jesse Gardner
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