Iphone, Ipad, Itouch, Ipod, I.I.I.I.I.
The world in which I live in today tells me that everything should be all about me. The shirt on my very back today, in little writing by the tag says, "My Life. My World. My Decree." Everywhere I go I am bombarded by this thought that it's about me. Even this blog...well...it's about me and my life and my thoughts.
Technology has now provided us with plenty of forums to make things about us. Twitter, Blogs, Pinterest, Facebook, all allow the user to glamourize themselves. Facebook, for example, is a community where we can put up the pictures that we want people to see us as, the good ones. Not the ones where our gut is hanging over our jeans or our zit looks huge from that angle, but the ones that have been shaded over by photoshop or the one that was taken 1200 times before it finally looked right. We can 'Like' the statuses and photos of the people we want to be associated with or we can not 'Like' the statuses or photos of people we are jealous of, envious of, find annoying, appalling, whatever it may be, it's our world and we can document it however we want. Accepting the "friends" we want, blocking the ones we don't want, 'checking in' to whatever cool restaurant we are at with whatever cool people.
We live in a society where we have the ability to present to the world a flawless picture of our lives. We can talk about how amazing our friends and family are so everyone can ooh and aww, while in real life, we are constantly tearing them down, ignoring them, rejecting them. We are learning how to ride on the accolades of others by putting on a show, a false reality. While leaving little concern about our actions in the real world.
Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of great things Facebook and other social networking sites can do. I am friends with people now, that I would have never been friends with had it not been for Facebook. I can put up pictures of Jace so that my family over in India can see him growing day by day instead of developing and mailing pictures to the hundreds of people over there. I've found great recipes on Pinterest. Blogging is my own little outlet. I like writing. And it's cool to look back on and see lessons I've learned along the way or seasons of life I've passed through. But also, it's all just fun. Pictures are fun. Leaving comments for your friends is fun.
But if you stop to think about it, how else is this all being used? To bring glory to our own lives? To, in a way, manufacture ourselves as Facebook "celebrities", with the perfect kids, perfect jobs, perfect friends, perfect families, perfect bodies? We are looking to portray our own strengths. To keep things in our control so we can show the world what we want them to see. And what exactly are we showing the world? That we are living lives that are unattainable?
Romans 12: 2 in the Message says "Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. ... Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you."
How easy has it become to fall into our culture. To use social platforms for our own social gain? To get obsessed and fixate on ourselves rather than maybe using these social outlets for HIS glory. Whatever happened to Him being strong in our weakness? Or us being perfected by His blood...not by an Instagram filter.
Matthew 10:39 says, "If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you'll find both yourself and me."
If we want Him to be the leader in our lives we need to stop being so concerned with our own image. We are more apt to following the sneaky schemes some marketing executives thought up in some board room, instead of listening and following a Perfect, Holy, King who decided to walk in our dirt and speak Life into us. Life that is made perfect by His perfection. Not our own.
