Something happened recently that I would never have expected, I closed down my
Twitter account, and made my LinkedIn account dormant to the point of serving only
as an online business card. I have been off Facebook for several years. Usually
during Lent I give up social media so that I can use that to spend more time with the
Lord. But being this is an election year, I decided that after Memorial Day I would
stay off the ‘feed’ until Labor Day, and then only lurk but not interact until after
Election Day.
As a Catholic man I strive to do God’s will. The best description that I’ve heard of
this is God’s will is that we depend on him. Sometimes, to depend on God, I
have to remove the messages bombarding me from our over saturated information
culture. Because the things I listen to contribute to my world view, and thus over
time become my values.
The thing I have learned about removing yourself from social media is that you have
to find something else to use that time with or you get the urge to go back on the feed
... yes, like an addiction. So this time I prayed for the Holy Spirit to show me God’s
will how I should fill this time. The thing that kept coming back to me from multiple
sources was to just have the mission focus on God and His will.
This reminded me that something I haven’t said much recently to all of you about
being a CMCS-Man is that to live mission means to eat, breathe, and sleep, what it
means to be “Living the Goodness of a Catholic Man”. So I applied this towards my
focus on God and His will – to eat and breathe, and sleep, depending on God.
I then organized the devotionals that I would spend time with, the (online) writers or
publications I would pull information from, and concentrate more on the daily
readings and what each message is saying about what God wanted of me or how I
should respond. In a nutshell, to slow down and see more of the world around me
and how God is at work through me, and to meet Him in that work.
A funny thing happened. I started to realize how the narrative in my own head was
from the many opinions that I collected on social media and the like, short of the
long, and how once this was removed my own thoughts started to emerge and come
to the surface. Thus when I saw how much my thoughts were suppressed, again and how
much being bathed in the love of God filled the void in my heart that much more, I
deleted my social media accounts.
I did not spend much time on social media, maybe 10 hours a week, but in looking
for information about the Church and its people, slowly but surly I was also sucked
into the politics, business, and bureaucracy, so to speak. You see, I believe that our world view determines out values, and thus determines how much we depend on God or not, and how we eat, breathe, and sleep His will for our lives.
