Quitting Facebook (for now)
I know, I know. It's been done before.
Most of us have probably deleted our Facebook accounts (or subsequent social media accounts) at one point or another, or we all have that friend that does this from time to time. But we/they almost always come back. Then there's that seemingly elusive friend who refuses to have a social media presence and you not-so-quietly wonder how they can possibly function in the twenty-first century.
Some of us need these accounts for our jobs. Some of us use them as a useful tool to keep in touch with friends around the world. Some of us spend more time looking at our own profiles and "stalking" people we haven't talked to in 10 years than actually connecting with real friends. Some of us have Facebook accounts in order to procrastinate: on school work, on job work, on house work, on life.
Whatever your reasoning for having social media accounts, it's certainly the way of the time. We are baffled when someone doesn't have at least one form of online presence, and there are many "friends" we keep up with only through Facebook or Instagram.
This fact becomes especially true for me when I think about engagements/weddings/babies. Most of the time, but especially around the holiday, it seems that everyone I know is doing one of these three things. Of course, that's not at all true--but boy does it feel like it.
And then I think...if I were to compile together all of the people on my newsfeed who got engaged, got married, or had a baby within this past month, how many of them would I actually know this about if it were not for Facebook?
Not many, I tell you. Not many.
Because for every life announcement I see on Facebook, I get far fewer phone calls or other personal messages telling me the "big news."
If it weren't for Facebook, I might have to go back to my hometown and read the newspaper, or talk to people who still live there, to find out that so-and-so is married now.
A girl who I met while studying abroad deleted her Facebook. Then I randomly got a text from one of our mutual friends, mentioning something about this girl's baby. She had an almost one-year-old and was engaged and I had no idea. There's something so real about this exchange. I actually had to interact with a human to find out about another human. After hearing the news, I immediately contacted this girl to find out more about her life. She sent me pictures of her gorgeous little girl and told me how content she is. It was so refreshing to have this organic conversation with an old friend, and not one that sounded something like "Oh yeah, I know this about you already because I saw it all on Facebook."
What if people didn't know we were engaged, married, or having babies until they saw us in person?
My parents are laughing right now: "That's how it was when we were your age, and that really wasn't that long ago."
An old friend of mine, Katie, got engaged several years ago. I got a text with a picture of the ring, and eventually called her to get all the details. I don't remember if we talked about it then, or later, but Katie told me that she wished she had waited longer to put the news on Facebook. She told me that after announcing it on social media, the amount of people who seemed to care about the news was overwhelming, and it took away from the sweet intimacy of being newly engaged.
Before that conversation, and certainly after it, I've thought about not putting my "engaged" news on social media for as long as possible. The problem, though, is that you can't control all the people who share your news on the internet. They postobscure really obvious congratulatory posts that definitely could have been sent through a text message or phone call and are actually just a way for them to let everyone on your friend's list know that they are in the know.
Because that's definitely what's important here.
First rule of Facebook: if the owner of the news has not shared any of it on the internet, you do not share anything of any kind that has to do with this news.
Okay. And then there's this whole issue. The one of people being more focused on the engagement ring than the engagement, on the wedding than on the marriage, on the baby shower than the baby that is literally going to change your entire life/lifestyle/perspective/relationships/schedule/etc.
And I really, really, really do not want to be that girl.
I'd certainly like to think that I'm not, and that there's no way I could be. But lately, I've been having a difficult time separating my desires for marriage from the pressures of society (capitalized through social media) versus God's perfect timing.
My boyfriend and I have been dating for two years, so we are naturally having conversations about the future. We've been long distance for a year, and have another year ahead of us, so we'd like for that to end as soon as possible. The idea of waking up next to each other and coming home to each other everyday sounds much better than being hundreds of miles apart. So marriage seems like a natural next step, and because of the way his job is set up, at least being engaged in a year seems about right.
But honestly, I feel like the social media frenzy is drowning out God's voice, and it is so difficult to hear Him about this area of my life. We definitely want to get married, but we also want to get married in a way that honors the Lord, that is within his timing, and that allows us the time we need to be prepared to step into this covenant. I don't want to get married on my own time, or on the time that society tells me. I want to get married on God's perfect time.
Because I am having, as I mentioned, a difficult time distinguishing between the Lord's direction for my life versus society's, the only natural solution is to step away from society's voice. And the only way I know to do that is to distance myself from Facebook.
The time that I spend on Facebook could be much better spent in prayer. Prayer for my heart, for his heart. Prayer for our future marriage that we want to be God-honoring and God-reflecting. Prayer for our individual selves, for the spiritual work that Jesus is doing in each of us, the journey that He has us on, the plans that He has for us. Prayer for the spiritual life He has planned for us together, that it would be the foundation of our marriage. Prayer for a true, deep, and real understanding of what the covenant of marriage actually means and what living that out actually looks like.
And prayer that we would hear the Lord's voice, loud and clear, over the thunderous sound of friends/family/acquaintances/media who have lots of well-meaning and good-natured advice to give.
Maybe I don't have to remove myself from Facebook in order to know that, when I do get married, that decision had nothing to do with the decisions of those I'm surrounded by. But if I can replace one hour of Facebook with one hour of prayer, I think that I'll be more than confident--and maybe even blessed--that we are stepping into the Lord's plan in His timing for his glory...and not for the attention I will receive on social media.
Author's note: I do not mean to suggest that those of you who have gotten engaged/married while maintaing a social media presence did so under the pressures of society. Please do not hear that. What I am saying is that I have found myself to be particularly vulnerable to these pressures, and have thus chosen to distance myself from them. If you found other ways to drown out the voice of Facebook on the issue of marriage or any others, I would love to hear your methods and ideas!
Thanks for reading,
Leslie
Most of us have probably deleted our Facebook accounts (or subsequent social media accounts) at one point or another, or we all have that friend that does this from time to time. But we/they almost always come back. Then there's that seemingly elusive friend who refuses to have a social media presence and you not-so-quietly wonder how they can possibly function in the twenty-first century.
Some of us need these accounts for our jobs. Some of us use them as a useful tool to keep in touch with friends around the world. Some of us spend more time looking at our own profiles and "stalking" people we haven't talked to in 10 years than actually connecting with real friends. Some of us have Facebook accounts in order to procrastinate: on school work, on job work, on house work, on life.
Whatever your reasoning for having social media accounts, it's certainly the way of the time. We are baffled when someone doesn't have at least one form of online presence, and there are many "friends" we keep up with only through Facebook or Instagram.
This fact becomes especially true for me when I think about engagements/weddings/babies. Most of the time, but especially around the holiday, it seems that everyone I know is doing one of these three things. Of course, that's not at all true--but boy does it feel like it.
And then I think...if I were to compile together all of the people on my newsfeed who got engaged, got married, or had a baby within this past month, how many of them would I actually know this about if it were not for Facebook?
Not many, I tell you. Not many.
Because for every life announcement I see on Facebook, I get far fewer phone calls or other personal messages telling me the "big news."
If it weren't for Facebook, I might have to go back to my hometown and read the newspaper, or talk to people who still live there, to find out that so-and-so is married now.
A girl who I met while studying abroad deleted her Facebook. Then I randomly got a text from one of our mutual friends, mentioning something about this girl's baby. She had an almost one-year-old and was engaged and I had no idea. There's something so real about this exchange. I actually had to interact with a human to find out about another human. After hearing the news, I immediately contacted this girl to find out more about her life. She sent me pictures of her gorgeous little girl and told me how content she is. It was so refreshing to have this organic conversation with an old friend, and not one that sounded something like "Oh yeah, I know this about you already because I saw it all on Facebook."
What if people didn't know we were engaged, married, or having babies until they saw us in person?
My parents are laughing right now: "That's how it was when we were your age, and that really wasn't that long ago."
An old friend of mine, Katie, got engaged several years ago. I got a text with a picture of the ring, and eventually called her to get all the details. I don't remember if we talked about it then, or later, but Katie told me that she wished she had waited longer to put the news on Facebook. She told me that after announcing it on social media, the amount of people who seemed to care about the news was overwhelming, and it took away from the sweet intimacy of being newly engaged.
Before that conversation, and certainly after it, I've thought about not putting my "engaged" news on social media for as long as possible. The problem, though, is that you can't control all the people who share your news on the internet. They post
Because that's definitely what's important here.
First rule of Facebook: if the owner of the news has not shared any of it on the internet, you do not share anything of any kind that has to do with this news.
Okay. And then there's this whole issue. The one of people being more focused on the engagement ring than the engagement, on the wedding than on the marriage, on the baby shower than the baby that is literally going to change your entire life/lifestyle/perspective/relationships/schedule/etc.
And I really, really, really do not want to be that girl.
I'd certainly like to think that I'm not, and that there's no way I could be. But lately, I've been having a difficult time separating my desires for marriage from the pressures of society (capitalized through social media) versus God's perfect timing.
My boyfriend and I have been dating for two years, so we are naturally having conversations about the future. We've been long distance for a year, and have another year ahead of us, so we'd like for that to end as soon as possible. The idea of waking up next to each other and coming home to each other everyday sounds much better than being hundreds of miles apart. So marriage seems like a natural next step, and because of the way his job is set up, at least being engaged in a year seems about right.
But honestly, I feel like the social media frenzy is drowning out God's voice, and it is so difficult to hear Him about this area of my life. We definitely want to get married, but we also want to get married in a way that honors the Lord, that is within his timing, and that allows us the time we need to be prepared to step into this covenant. I don't want to get married on my own time, or on the time that society tells me. I want to get married on God's perfect time.
Because I am having, as I mentioned, a difficult time distinguishing between the Lord's direction for my life versus society's, the only natural solution is to step away from society's voice. And the only way I know to do that is to distance myself from Facebook.
The time that I spend on Facebook could be much better spent in prayer. Prayer for my heart, for his heart. Prayer for our future marriage that we want to be God-honoring and God-reflecting. Prayer for our individual selves, for the spiritual work that Jesus is doing in each of us, the journey that He has us on, the plans that He has for us. Prayer for the spiritual life He has planned for us together, that it would be the foundation of our marriage. Prayer for a true, deep, and real understanding of what the covenant of marriage actually means and what living that out actually looks like.
And prayer that we would hear the Lord's voice, loud and clear, over the thunderous sound of friends/family/acquaintances/media who have lots of well-meaning and good-natured advice to give.
Maybe I don't have to remove myself from Facebook in order to know that, when I do get married, that decision had nothing to do with the decisions of those I'm surrounded by. But if I can replace one hour of Facebook with one hour of prayer, I think that I'll be more than confident--and maybe even blessed--that we are stepping into the Lord's plan in His timing for his glory...and not for the attention I will receive on social media.
Author's note: I do not mean to suggest that those of you who have gotten engaged/married while maintaing a social media presence did so under the pressures of society. Please do not hear that. What I am saying is that I have found myself to be particularly vulnerable to these pressures, and have thus chosen to distance myself from them. If you found other ways to drown out the voice of Facebook on the issue of marriage or any others, I would love to hear your methods and ideas!
Thanks for reading,
Leslie
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