Jesus and Social Media

The time has come again...

The call for me to take a big ol' break from facebook. Aka: How to Waste Time 101.

I'm becoming more and more aware of the church's push for the effective use of social media as a way of furthering the message of the Gospel. I see over and over again that we communicate using twitter and facebook.

My disclaimer: I absolutely see the value in social media. I very much respect the potential that it holds for connecting people and transmitting information to the masses.

I won't speak for anyone else and it would be wrong of me to even consider/judge the way other people use it (but I'm human so sometimes I do that). But, I fear and am very much aware that in my own life, like any good thing God has given us, I spend much more time using His gifts for my own purposes than for His glory or to further His Kingdom.

Let me be real vulnerable about what my time on facebook looks like...

I read my newsfeed.
I click on random friends' profiles and read their walls.
I read comments that people, who I don't even know, have left them.
I question what some of those comments mean and what may be going on in their life and sometimes even make my own assumptions as to what those mean. (This is a BAD idea).
Sometimes I even go to their friends' walls and on the off chance they don't have their privacy settings a certain way, read how my friends responded to them.
I look at picture albums posted, again by people I don't know, that have my friends in them and sometimes at picture albums full of people I don't even know.
I find out information that I'm not even seeking and probably don't need to know.

I know what my friends' plans are for the weekend.
I know what my friends did last weekend.
I know who is dating who.
I know inside jokes between people, without knowing what they actually mean.
I know who has family members who passed away.
I know who knows who.

I know SO much information that 1. I don't need to know and 2. Was not actually invited to know.

Seriously? When this is in words in front of me...it sounds certifiably insane.

I have ways of finding out information that by no means was someone planning on telling ME when they wrote it on a mutual friend's wall. While I recognize that in posting something on someone's wall they are allowing anyone to read it, it doesn't mean it ever crossed their mind that I would.

And I don't want to learn things that way. I want to learn things because someone wanted to share it with me. I want to learn about conversations one person had with another simply because they wanted me to know that information, because they wanted to share how it impacted their heart.

And even harder to deal with, but somewhere deep down is true, I want to NOT know what others don't want me to know.

I don't want to be a gossip. I don't want to be nosey. There is nothing edifying in any of that. Sometimes I feel like it's like if I were to read someone's diary. I would find out information that only further peaks my interest, but I'm not in a position to actually talk to them about it because I shouldn't have read it anyway. There's nothing comfortable about being in that place. And there's nothing glorifying about it.

So, I'm giving up facebook again for a little bit until I can have a more God-centered relationship with it. Until I can use it not as a way of distracting me from my boredom, which in turn leads to all of the above, but until I can use it for the SOLE purpose of being intentional in my relationships and possibly furthering the message of the Gospel.

I can only imagine what all I'll miss in however long this break takes, but I'm kind of ready to be missing a lot of that and definitely ready to find out what I'll gain in the meantime.