Facebook

I’ve spent the past several days off of Facebook and it has really been a mind opening experience. I hadn’t realized to the extent of how absolutely addicted I was to it. As silly as it sounds, I have felt so much pressure off of me as I’ve taken a break from it. We live in a technology driven culture and with that, there is a constant feeling I have of always know what is going on and happening. This started at first with what was going on it famous people’s lives. A few years back I became intrigued with celebrity lifestyles, not that I wanted that, I just wanted to know what was going on in them. This slowly drifted over to my Facebook friends. I’m not one of those people who are constantly on Facebook or check and update it incessantly, but I found myself having to read my entire newsfeed, figuring out what my friends had been doing since the last time I was on.  I slowly became addicted to a social media network, spending my time reading about people’s lives that I’m not even close with.  Seriously, what a waste!

Please don’t hear my say I’m deleting my Facebook page or that I think it is bad. That’s really not the case at all. (I do however want to spend my time more productively.) My problem with Facebook is this: people feel like that they need to broadcast their lives in a public display and make the small details of their lives seem like celebrity events. It’s a bit of a joke when you really stop to think about it. Last month my family found out about someone speaking poorly of us on Facebook. You should have seen us all up in shambles over something that wasn’t even spoken clearly or pointed fingers directly to us.  For a few days I was so upset by something so silly. I finally realized that it really didn’t matter. I knew in my heart that I wasn’t in the wrong and that’s what counts. There is no need for me to live my life walking on egg shells when I know that I’m living with good intentions.

So in the next few days as I transition back into social media that’s what I want to focus on. Am I spending my time wisely? Am I making my life seem more important than it actually is? Am I allowing the silly thoughts of others to affect my life? I want my life to point others to Jesus. If I can do that on Facebook, awesome. If not, what am I really doing?

A Few Thoughts on Faith

Being my OCD self I have a list of things to blog on. Obviously, that hasn’t happened and this blog isn’t even part of the list. 2011 has come and gone with such change in our lives from the beginning of the year to the end that it is almost difficult to process. I knew when I married JD that life would not be quiet, still or consistent but I was not at all prepared for the adventure that lay ahead of us. We are doing things that most young married couples wouldn’t begin to even think about, yet alone try. It makes me feel old and somewhat out of place in our generation. That has been the story of my life though. Since I gave my whole life to Jesus in June of 2006, I have lived very different than others my age. I don’t say that in a chip on my shoulder kind of way but simply to say that it is not a new thing for me to live somewhat counter-culturally.

A man I met briefly at the end of 2007 told me he saw me living my entire life against the grain. I have never forgotten his statement, yet over 4 years later it still doesn’t make it any easier to do.  People think I’m some weird, over spiritual person because I’ve devoted my life to Christ. While many my age feel the freedom to participate in the rampant sin of our generation, I hold different values. The same is true in our marriage. Very early our faith was stretched more than what I thought we could handle when we moved to back to Colorado. Yet here we still are, more devoted to our faith and thankful for the life we have here. I was hoping that the move would be the end of our faith stretching, yet here we are just a year and a half later and I feel like we are being stretched again, yet in a totally different way.

That’s the funny thing about faith. We feel like once we have gotten through something once we won’t have to go through anything again. What a misperception! It is so easy to sit in church and listen to a message about faith and say, “Amen!” and get into the hype of the emotion. But how can we consistently turn that hype into action? What makes us change from simply sitting in a church thinking we are good Christians because we showed up, to being devoted followers of Christ who live our lives with audacious faith? I don’t have the answers and it’s a hard thing to tackle, yet that is what I find myself often thinking of.

I want to live my whole life in a way that pleases the Lord. That doesn’t mean that I have to talk to every person I encounter about my beliefs.  It doesn’t mean that I have to sit all day and do nothing but read my bible. It doesn’t mean that I have to live a rigid life by some set of rules. What it does mean is that I have to be faithful to the things that I feel like God has called me to: serving, giving, loving. It means that when I feel like quitting, I have to trust that God is making a way for me.  I have to trust that God is bigger than the emotions I feel, the wrongs that I feel have been made to me, the situations that I cannot begin to wrap my head around. I have to trust and believe that I serve a God where nothing is impossible and bend my life around that fact. That for me is what living a faithful life means.  That’s how I want to please the Lord.