For lent I gave up Facebook and sugar. It's going well, but part of that Lenten process was for me to pick up some different, better habits, and I feel like it has drawn me closer to God. I pray more often during the day, and I'm more focused. But one thing I know God told me at the beginning of Lent was that He wanted me to write more often. And then my computer broke...
So I started writing by hand, journaling a lot, and processing my reading each morning through hand written pages. It was frustrating for a number of reasons. My handwriting is hard to read, first off. Also my brain has gone into overdrive since I've started typing so much, and I seem to be able to process much faster, but my hand doesn't move that fast with a pencil. I had to really slow down.
At the end of February I began to notice a pattern in my reading, messages I was receiving through church or podcasts, books that I had been reading. Idolatry. Specifically I was reading a novel about Hezekiah's childhood up through his reign as king. At one point, Hezekiah and his grandfather Ezekiel were in conversation about idolatry. Hezekiah refused to worship any God. He was trained by an Egyptian scholar who also worshiped nothing. Or so they thought . . . but as the conversation went, Ezekiel was able to explain to Hezekiah that what you worship doesn't have to be an idol or another thing proclaiming itself as a deity. If you put anything in front of your relationship with God, it is your idol. Your graven image. For Hezekiah it was his knowledge and his education.
Whoa.
I went back to the book study that I had done with church on the book Breathing Underwater by Richard Rohr. And immediately I felt compelled to make a list of things that I tended to put in front of my relationship with God. I found that food (my number one nemesis), relationships with certain people including my children, time, money, knowledge, the future, and my physical body seemed to consume me at times. I wasn't expecting this list to be so long, honestly, because at the time I read that book, I had focused so much on food. I had no idea that I am actually more consumed by other things than I had imagined.
The very next day, God told me to start going through the Bible and looking up scriptures on those things. Food was first, and so I did. This took me over a week because once I started reading one verse, I realized how pertinent the entire chapter or few chapters were. And do you know what I found??? Every scripture I found on this segment of my life had nothing to do with food and how I should deal with it. They all told me the same thing. Give. Give openly, freely, and with love. Not give food. Just give. Give and it will fill you with love. I realized that the perfect love that I'd been seeking had been stifled because I was keeping things to myself.
God was telling me that sharing (with boundaries, of course) is of Him, and I'll be filled with his love as I do it. I feel like my issues with food stem from selfishness. That was my first idol.
Well this morning I was reading and writing again, and I was led to Proverbs 9 - a chapter on wisdom and foolishness. I conversation I had with a very dear friend this morning made me look up foolishness because of the wild behavior of her neighbor. In Proverbs, Solomon writes that a wise person will teach wise people. That attempting to correct wicked or foolish people will only cause us insult and hurt.
I was immediately brought back to my days as a teacher in the public ed system, and the number of kids who did not want to be there, could have cared less if they got an A or an F, and really had better things to do. Hear me when I say that I do not believe that the public ed system teaches wisdom, because I most certainly do not. But what I am saying is that if you were to go to any of those kids in my classroom and offer to release them, at least eighty percent of them would go home and stay there. They'd pull out their phones, computers, game systems, and they'd plug in. They saw no value in what they were learning and they had better things to do.
My own children drive me nuts with the phones, computers, WiiU, PlayStation, etc. When the WiFi goes down, it is a national disaster, and Jesus himself could be sitting at my piano bench - they WILL interrupt me to tell me and ask me to fix it.
We wonder why we can't engage our children in conversation? We wonder why they choose to skip homework? We wonder why they're not curious. We wonder why church is not enticing to them. Take a look at what they hold in their hands for hours. I was convicted by this thought. There lies their idol, friends. Today's technology is the answer to everything - and it is the piece that will destroy us as well. Millions of human beings already exhibit physiological symptoms of addiction to their tech. Try it. Try unplugging for 24 hours.
Even giving up Facebook for lent for me threw me for a loop. My email box is cleaner now, as I still reach for my phone unconsciously to look at it. Is that really what I want? Is that what God wants? It is unlikely we are going to find him in that little hunk of circuits and bright screen. God is not in YouTube and he's not in Candy Crush. He's not on Facebook, and he's not on Instagram.
He is all around us. His Word contains life's wisdom. Open it up, friends. Put down the phone. Face your idols and ask His Spirit to take control of that aspect of your life and the lives of your children.
What are your idols? What does the Bible say about them? How can you ask God to help you to set them aside and put Him first again?
Namaste.
