The Best Thing I Ever Did

... Was get off Facebook!

I am sorry, but I am not kidding. I am a people-pleaser. I want people to like me. I always have. That is part of who God made me, but I started realizing that I was letting Facebook dictate my emotions. I am very visual and wear my heart on my sleeve. 

It was getting impossible to go onto to Facebook and reading people's "highlight reels" and wondering what was wrong with me? Why wasn't God blessing me with that? What did I do to deserve less than that person? I didn't get to spend four hours in my devotions today. Hey, I haven't done that (the four hours part) since Christmas break... maybe I am not as spiritual as that person. Or look at the person's beautiful new house. Oh, wait, you mean this is the third house upgrade they have had since we graduated college together? (Oh, yes, I am living in my third and smallest apartment in three years.) Oh, no, I am not a youth pastor's wife anymore. Oh, no, I don't have any kids. Oh, no, we don't have two awesome cars, two brand new iPads, a house, a dog, the latest clothes, huge diamond rings, and four perfectly angelic super-spiritual kids. Yes, I work outside the home and no, I don't do a great job cooking for my husband every night. It's a miracle we have clean clothes sometimes. 

And I was letting all of that crazy dictate my relationship with God and my emotions.

And that's wrong. 

My relationship with God is dependent on my time with Him and it is a personal relationship between us, not between me and Facebook and God or me and the entire planet and God. It is a relationship between me and God. I cannot let someone else determine how spiritual I am. I am never going to be Pricilla Shirer or Beth Moore or the most popular girl from my college campus. Right now, God doesn't even have me as a youth pastor's wife. 

But that is ok because I am right where God wants me to be. I am being who He wants me to be and my relationship with Him is growing. I am not perfect. I am will be the first to admit that. I mess up and fail God regularly, but my goal is to like Christ, not to be the person my "Christian culture" tells me to be. 

I had to come to the point where I realized that Facebook was part of what hindered me from growing closer to God and also what was causing some of the emotional distress I was facing. 

To break the Facebook chains of bondage I started by deleting the apps on my phone and iPad, but quickly realized that I needed to go through a period of complete separation from Facebook. For me, that was a two solid week period of zero-facebook. 

Since then I go on Facebook for ten minutes a week on either a Friday or Saturday night. Once that ten minutes is up, I get off.

The difference has been near magical!

In the last two full months that I have been off Facebook, I feel a little more focused, more content, more apt to ask a  person how they are doing personally, and far less dependent on social media. Yah, I missed my best friend's Facebook announcement about her second pregnancy. She lives several hours away, but we actually got to talk a few days earlier so I knew before the wonderful world of Facebook! I don't know what is going on in certain people's daily lives. It has been good and bad.

Moral of the story - I survived and I am surviving. I don't think I will be heading back to Facebook any time soon. The world keeps spinning.