Last night I sent an email to all my Facebook friends passing them my contact details and telling them that I would be closing my Facebook account this weekend. I have been truly surprised by the number of messages and emails I have received, and though some were of confusion, concerns and worries, most were people sharing how much they have enjoyed reading my posts and how much they will miss me. To be honest I have been quite overwhelmed with the kindness, and more so never realised how many people actually noticed what I was writing, let alone took any of it seriously.
There are a number of reasons why I have decided to close my Facebook account; most would probably be a surprise to you but perhaps not to those who know me best. This article is in a sense a written confirmation for myself, but mostly an explanation to my friends.
The perpetual cocktail party.
I am useless at small-talk.
An old Chaplin I used to visit for tea, once called me a ‘laser-beam’ and chastised me regularly for my intensity especially when all he wanted was to chat about the cricket. I am also not a party person, nor am I particularly good with a lot of people. If you have the naivety to invite me to a social gathering you will notice that I will immediately search out the room for your parents, or the Linux kernel hacker, PhD biochemist, drag-queen or trainee pastor. You will find me holding up the wall all night engaged in conversation about carbon-bonding, penal substitutionary atonement, sexual relativism, Emacs Lisp functions or Argentine Tango.
I find the internet a frustrating place, and more so its social functions: Facebook, Twitter et al. Facebook is for me like one giant cocktail party and frankly I do not have the tools to navigate my way around the buffet table of unappetising information. I also find myself constantly being the person who after raising his voice to talk over the noise, shouts just at the point where the music stops leaving people looking at me bewildered and embarrassed.
Such are then my contributions on the wall of the online social network. While everyone else is posting holiday snapshots, I am posting an argument for the complete dismissal of the Biblical Trinitarian God as mere superstition if the Hebrews were never historically held captive in Egypt. That or something lighter perhaps, a metaphorical Protestant Reformation quip about my personal health: “Anima Mens sana in corpore sano. Corpus, cor et animus semper reformanda est.”, created and posted even though I know full-well no one speaks Latin, and anyone who did would realise neither do I.
It was wasted on me.
Facebook was wasted on someone like me. Every evening I cleared my wall as I saw Facebook as a tool for conversation, and I did not understand why anyone would willingly want their conversations to hang around ad infinitum. I just find this odd, especially because in real life it does not work this way. Thank God, thank context!
I am exactly the wrong type of person to use Facebook. I have the unfortunate temperament that craves affirmation and demands perfection, and these two meet not only externally but internally to. I may post what is to you merely 420 characters, but to me it is a very carefully selected 420 characters which may have had up to an hour of scrutiny. I could never leave a post on my wall that was not as close to perfection as I could make it.
Though I must admit the limitation did at time provide the soil for creative writing. But this is one of the reasons I never managed to use Twitter as I could never perfect a thought succinctly enough without destroying its form and rhythm. Words matter to me and I struggle with brevity (you may have noticed).
How I lost myself.
My biggest flaw (or the bigger of many) is the desire to be affirmed. I do not wish it on anyone as it can make you lose your entire center at any moment. It is this which is one half of the majority of my reasons to leave Facebook. If you spend a great deal of time trying to communicate perfectly and with the expectation that you will be received specifically and you are not, or not as you had hoped you would be, be that by apathy or criticism; you are left in a precarious position. Facebook brought out the worst of me at times, as I would continually market myself and then retract when I realised I was either not received well or my arrogance was shown for what it was; arrogance.
One blessing in knowing Jesus is that the more you know of God the more you understand fundamentally how undeserving you are of any glory yourself. This is not a bad thing and is precisely what I want to shape my life as a creature by and the reason I needed to leave the Facebook stage. My identity is objective, eternal and declared by God my creator, it is not self-referential and dependant on what I create for myself. It is knowing the objectivity of God that you feel secure, not securing your subjectivity in effort to know yourself.
Now not everyone sees Facebook as a digital peacock’s tail, I know that and I know the great majority of people see it merely for what it is. But I cannot help but think that there is more going on with identity and community, and under the surface our profile picture selections may possibly show more about the state of our hearts than anything else in life. The fact that Facebook is called Facebook should give us pause for thought, and it seems at times that we can’t really see the book for its cover.
Comparative lifestyles.
Another reason I found Facebook particularly difficult was comparative lifestyles. If your life does not fit the current trending model, then you immediately feel alienated and this can be on various levels. My health has not been great this last couple of years and has prevented me from travelling, and so simply seeing my friends’ holiday snaps is difficult. If you are not in a particularly good place in life, then being bombarded with smiling happy lives is not encouraging but exhausting. Now obviously I should be happy that others are happy and you would be quite right in saying that; but if you are starving, and have your hands and mouth bound, watching others feast does not loosen anything but your conscience.
This can also relate to values. I am not advocating retreating from the world, no not at all; Jesus never did. But you need to be strong (in prayer) enough daily to login and be faced with opinions and values which will inevitably be in contrast with those of your own if you hold a Biblical world-view. More so if you engage with a predominantly anti-Biblical group of friends. I have learnt so much and am so thankful for the friends I have who speak their minds, and trust and know that I will listen to them even though they may at time say things in direct contrast to what I believe. I thank God that my close friends know my background, and so can call out my hypocrisy when they see it, but also be witness to the grace of God in my life. It is magnificent to know, that they know that I have no moral high-ground whatsoever and that I cannot ever speak from a point of righteousness other than that of the objective declaration of God over me, which is also theirs to freely take if they so desire.
I do tell the few Christian friends I have that they need to know more non-Christians. Mainly because there is little that makes you love others and pray more than realising that you may know the Truth and are set free by Jesus, but that you have almost zero understanding of the prevailing world-view and that which you were freed from. It takes a great deal of courage to actually live every day in the reality of the world, and not your cozy warm escapist christianism which is not real. Jesus came into the world, he did not live in a fantasy one. If you are not wrestling monthly with the complexity and pain of the reality of God’s sovereignity and the state of the world, then maybe you are living on a desert island. If you are a Christian and you don’t find life tearfully difficult then I would very much doubt your understanding of God, let alone your prayer life. You cannot hold God as your greatest treasure and equally mirror the lives of everyone who doesn’t. I beg you, get off the beach and into the cultural sea, get out of your christianism and your christian moral-philosophical beach-house before you meet God and he tells you that he never knew you.
I am realising that if I don’t see the fundamental joy, purpose and need for prayer every day then I am not a Christian because I do not grasp the severity and weight of the reality within which I live, let alone understand that I am free from sin to which I was once in bondage. I am though not free by my effort to pray, my religiousity; no I am free because I am declared free and set free by the work of God at the cross: the means which Jesus brought me to God Himself, the greatest gift and joy I could ever receive, forgiveness and reconciliation. God is no longer angry with me, I am no longer an enemy of God, because I have a heart that wants God rather than hates Him. I get the satisfaction, and God gets all the glory. He was the one who changed my heart, this was the first part of the gift of the cross.
I thus pray because I really see the world as God does with newly opened eyes, I do not pray because I want to close my eyes and escape it.
Authenticity.
The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love. He who loveth mean and sordid things doth thereby become base and vile, but a noble and well-placed affection doth advance and improve the spirit into conformity with the perfections which it loves. The images of these do frequently present themselves unto the mind, and, by secret force and energy, insinuate into the very constitution of the soul, and mould and fashion it unto their own likeness.
Henry Scougal. The life of God in the Soul of Man.
Thus this all brings me to my main point, and the entire summation of my reason to leave Facebook. Simply I want God, and I want to take my life seriously and gloriously. How am I ever to be useful, or even humble enough to be used by God if I spend my entire time focused on myself or on triviality. Please understand that I mean no disrespect to anyone, but simply it is my flaws, my addiction for affirmation and my poor time-management that are my greatest hindrance to maturity. Facebook was merely the hand which shook the glass exposing that my life was not as clear as I first thought; rather it was full of the settled sediment of a misplaced identity.
I believe you become what you most enjoy, what you read about, watch, think and celebrate. I want to be known and remembered for burning myself out in the service of people and God for and through something spectacular and difficult. That is my investment, this is my focus. Therefore this means that I need to manage my time and my mind; these are my greatest weaknesses and so I am giving them to God, for His grace is sufficient for me, for His power is made perfect in my weakness.
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.
ESV. Philippians 4:4-8