Ash Wednesday arrives on Wednesday, March 5, to launch us into the season of Lent and the corresponding Jewish holy days. I have felt led to fast social media for those forty days. Forty days of no social media, not being triggered by other FB friends, a time to become quieter, still some of the noise, and be more reflective. A time to right-size myself in being reminded that God is on His throne and I’m not.
Some of my friends have urged me not to go. “Now is a time to press into the fray, not back away!” they say. Others have asked me why I am doing it. Here is a little more background to why I’m stepping back.
My local church is currently in a sermon series on Moses’s life entitled, Faith Over Fear. I have been asked to preach the seventh sermon in the series from Exodus 6, where God underscores to Moses that He is the Deliverer of his people, not Moses.
Earlier in the Exodus narrative, back when Moses was a prince in Egypt, he saw an injustice happening when an Egyptian was beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. Moses was enraged by this injustice and took matters into his own hands by killing the Egyptian. Moses had the right impulse but took the wrong action. He wanted to stop injustice, but he did it by taking matters into his own hands. And that is very easy for us all to fall prey to!
A lot of injustice is happening in our world, and there’s a lot to be angry about. Our political atmosphere is charged like never before, and social media is masterful at sparking fires that often create more heat than light. It is so easy to become triggered to react in fleshly and unhelpful ways. That’s one reason I am taking a social media fast.
After Moses killed the Egyptian, he fled the desert of Midian, where he lived a life of quiet solitude as a shepherd for the next forty years. In this quiet desert, he encountered God in the burning bush and moved from merely knowing about God to knowing God. In the desert, God stripped away things from Moses’s life, and as he tended sheep, God nurtured a shepherd’s heart into Moses.
Moses was in the right environment – He got away from the noise, in a place of solitude. There are times we need to do that as well. We must move into a quieter place to allow God to strip away and add what He knows we need. One of the loudest places in our society today is in the land of social media. Sometimes we need to step back to meet with God to allow Him to do his stripping and adding work to make us more fit to be used as a tool in His hand. That’s what I feel called to do in the next forty days. I am not abdicating my responsibility; I want to right-size myself in God’s plan so that he can better use me, making me more responsive to the promptings of His Spirit than my impulsive flesh.
Might God be calling you to take a step back? Selah.