Facebook Fast: Days 3 & 4

 I am sorely missing an audience. I think I have well and truly worked out what it is that is so addictive to me personally, apart from the affirmation, which we covered yesterday. It's the same thing I get from preaching. Attention. I don't mean fuss, although I like that too. I mean people listening to me. I think primarily I feel like I don't have much of a voice in society and I suppose it's my Achilles heel. Even now, I am writing to an audience, but the reality is, no one but those to whom I have shared this with will be reading it. The fast dictates I will not be sharing it (or at least not now) but still I write to my invisible audience. The thing I hate most of all is to be ignored, or cut off. Being heard makes me feel like I matter. So it is affirmation, but it is a specific kind of affirmation.

I read day 3's reading today and Wendy spoke about a verse from Jeremiah (2:13)

“My people have committed two sins:

They have forsaken me,

    the spring of living water,

and have dug their own cisterns,

    broken cisterns that cannot hold water."

 

 What is this 'attention bubble' if it is not a cracked cistern? It is certainly a cistern that cannot hold water, as people's approval can come and go and be very fickle, but it is never more fickle than on social media. Because you get 'likes' or comments or reshares you seem to get a lot of reward but it is seldom lasting. I spend a lot more time thinking about the people who didn't like or share my posts than I do about those that did. In fact I kind of dismiss those that do rather quickly which is to cheapen it, and of course some of those can be very genuine, as are many of my own 'likes' of other peoples posts.

But aside from it's vacuous nature, it is not peoples attention we should be driven by, and in doing so we are often forsaking the 'spring of living water', the Lord himself. This surely is the purpose of fasting. As Wendy said its not that we are somehow putting social media in its place. That, although a fine biproduct, is not the object. The object is to put God in his rightful place. Not that the sovereign God has ever not been in his rightful place, but rather that we haven't acknowledged it as we should.

Here's my confession, I am not sure how to. I pray that that can and does change. I'm not drinking form the source that satisfies. Jesus said we would never thirst again. This cracked cistern has left me with an unquenchable thirst for something that NEVER delivers. The water that will quench my thirst forever. That's the water I need. That's the only affirmation. The Love of the Father. That is what  I need to meditate on.