Driving Notes

There are a lot of people who don’t believe me when I say it or who give me a funny look. “What, you mean you don’t have a facebook?!” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had that conversation in the last eight months. Yes, I’ve been facebook free for eight months and I couldn’t be happier.

Now, let me start by saying that I’m not against social networking sites. I think that they can and often prove to be effective tools in communication. I don’t shun people who do use facebook or look down on them. I’m not one of those people who is a techno-phobe or someone who will go out of my way to make sure people think facebook is evil. I don’t do that because I don’t think it is.

So why did I walk away from facebook, you ask? There are a lot of reasons, really. For starters, it’s too easy to be impersonal. One thing that I’ve been learning recently is that God intended us to be with people. FaceBook makes it almost too easy to do that and I started to question the kind of relationship I was creating with my 256 “friends”. How many of them did I really care to let know whatever was going on in my life? How many of them cared? I started tailoring what I was writing to appease others, putting up a face on facebook that wasn’t my own.

Reason number 2: facebook is a major time-waster for me. I was spending about two to three hours a DAY checking, writing on, and looking through facebook pages. That’s two to three hours I could have been doing my homework or spending time making lasting relationships with the people I care about.

And the third and biggest reason I walked away from the popular social networking site? It came before God.

God tells us in Exodus “You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3). I was living in direct violation of this command. I ran to facebook before I ran to God. When I had something I was dealing with: status update and then later, if I remembered, I’d pray about it. When I was looking for answers to questions, I’d ask my facebook friends before I even considered asking God or reading His word. Toward the end of December 2010, I was getting tired. I felt like I kept asking the big questions and I was getting nothing in response. I was expecting facebook to fill me, I was being left empty and I was blaming God.

Over Christmas break I had a lot of time to think about it and I felt like God was calling me to just let facebook go for a week or two. I did and spent that time seeking hard after Him and reading His word. At the end of the two weeks I got back on my facebook and discovered that I wasn’t quite as enthralled with it as I had been. It seemed tedious to sit there and scroll through update after update about people who were desperately searching for something that they couldn’t find there. I suddenly felt sad for them. If that was what it was about, I didn’t want any part of it.

I prayed about it hard for a few more days, telling God that if I did what He asked of me, people would think I was weird. People would think that I didn’t fit in, like I was behind the times, and like I was just… odd. And the answer I got was quite simple: isn’t that what we’re called to do?

John 15:19 says “If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.” If we’re really called to be different from the world, I think it’s time we start being different. And that comes with a promise: people will hate you for it.

When was the last time someone disliked what you were doing because you were doing it for Christ? When was the last time you did something different from what the world was doing because it made your walk with Christ closer? 

There are definitely people who are not happy with me because I don’t have a facebook. I hear it all the time from most of my friends. They say it makes me weird. They say that it makes it harder to be friends with me: they have to make more of an effort and that’s uncomfortable for some of them. A lot of people said that to me at first. They were given a choice: put forth the effort and still be my friend, or slouch back into comfort and not be. There are people I know and care about on both sides of that line.

The point is this: God calls us to do the right thing and the hard thing. He calls us apart from the world. We’re supposed to look different. People are supposed to see us and say “There’s something about him/her that is right… I want that.”

So I suppose the question is this: do you look any different from the world or do you blend in? If you don’t look any different, you might want to look into that.

Christa