Jordan and I listened to a great message last night by Andy Stanley called “Ask It.” (You can check out the series here.) He challenged us to ask ourselves, in light of (1) our previous experiences, (2) our current circumstances, and (3) our future hopes and dreams, if this is the wise thing for me to do. (‘This’ being any situation or decision I’m faced with, becoming aware of how even seemingly small decisions can set me on a path towards God’s best for me or distraction, despair, destruction.)

THEN, as the Lord so lovingly does for me often, He reinforced this message in my devotion time, some of which was an excerpt from “I Will Look Up” by Kari Patterson.
(A great 31-day devotional to encourage you to seek the Lord first in your life.)

It was such a good passage that I just want to share with you today and let it speak for itself. I personally think it’s a great challenge to be aware and hold ourselves accountable to how we often, casually, approach ways to spend our time or meet our need for connection.

I want to prayerfully consider her words and the guidelines listed to consider if I’m making wise choices that are good for me -in light of my previous experiences, my current circumstances, and my future hopes and dreams.

Day 5: Online Relationships and Seeking Him

“I thought I was the only one.

I read a study last week that found that while 91% of people feel more connected as a result of Facebook, only 29% of people reported that it made them feel happier. In fact, a vast majority of people admitted self-destructive habits including gawking over people from the past (83%) and comparing themselves to others (76%). Strangely, we love being connected to all of these people, but we aren’t any happier because of it.

We’re funny creatures, aren’t we?

Don’t worry, this isn’t a FB-bashing article. I’m on there too. Although I’ll admit I’m not often actually  on there. I check in occasionally, but whenever I start scrolling down the feed, aimlessly
searching for who-knows-what, I find myself sucked into the social media hole. I emerge later—too much later—feeling a little dizzy and disillusioned. And, strangely, although I’m connecting with people there, I actually feel more disconnected to the real-time 3-D life I’m living right there in the moment.

It’s not all bad. Obviously the problem is us, not social media. But it poses a problem we must deal with – how to effectively exercise discernment and discipline in our relationships when we just have so stinkin’many of them.

Are our online relationships help or hindrance to our relationship with Christ? To seeking Him first?

Every person we interact with online is a form of relationship. Even if we only gawk at her photos or roll our eyes at her status updates. Even if we just spend an hour perusing her site because we’re so fascinated by her life. Every person we interact with creates a form of relationship, which influences us at least in the moment and sometimes even more.

Some sites I visit genuinely equip me, inspire me, encourage me, and challenge me. The online world isn’t an evil one. The point of this post is this:

We must evaluate: What is the fruit of my online relationships? Is it helping or hindering? (A relationship can be a two-way interaction or simply one-way interaction with an online in-put of any kind.)

Questions to consider: After spending time with this person or on this site …

• Do I want to engage more in the nitty-gritty details of my life or do I want to escape?
• Do I feel inspired, challenged, and encouraged to live for God or distracted and dis-heartened?
• Do I feel comparison and competition as a result of our interaction or do I feel confronted, convicted, comforted, or celebrated?
• Does this person exhibit the fruit of the Spirit? 

We must exercise discipline with who we allow into our homes and our hearts. Scripture says,“Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life” (Proverbs 4:23). Your life springs from my heart. And when my heart is overwhelmed with the picture-perfect images of immaculate homes, do-everything women who apparently never melt down in a heap of tears, or catty comments that sprung up on the social media feed, it’s harder to walk in the extravagant grace of Jesus Christ and keep my eyes on the life He’s given me here.

I’m not advocating living in a bubble, but I’m encouraging all of us to be discerning women. Our hearts are our most precious possession. Guard yours fiercely. 

(I do believe that thoughtful, intentional, online inputs are absolutely helpful in this life of faith. I wouldn’t have my blog if I didn’t. I believe we can create a safe, edifying circle where we’re challenged, equipped, inspired, convicted, and encouraged to know, love, and follow Jesus Christ.My goal for Sacred Mundane is exactly that, and I’d be honored to interact with you there. Come visit?)

 Action Step »
Check out these great 12 guidelines for social networking below (included in Tim Chester’s new book, Will You Be My Facebook Friend?) and spend some time today evaluating your online inputs.

Twelve Guidelines for Social Networking by Tim Chester

1. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say were the people concerned in the room.
2. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t share publicly with your Christian community.
3. Ensure your online community is visible to your offline Christian community.
4. Challenge one another if you think someone’s online self reflects a self-created identity rather than identity in Christ.
5. Challenge one another if you think someone’s online self doesn’t match their offline self. 
6. Use social networking to enhance real world relationship not to replace them. 
7. Don’t let children have unsupervised internet access or accept as online friends people you don’t know offline. 
8. Set limits to the time you spend online and ask someone to hold you accountable to these.
9. Set aside a day a week as a technology “Sabbath” or “fast”. 
10. Avoid alerts (emails, tweets, texts and so on) that interrupt other activities especially reading, praying, worshiping and relating.
11. Ban mobiles from the meal table and the bedroom. 
12. Look for opportunities to replace disembodied (online or phone) communication with embodied (face-to-face) communication. 

I should have braced myself.

Putting it out there, live on the “internets”, that my word for 2014 is Embrace.

I think that’s like praying for patience. (Commence opportunities to put this new little verb into action.)

This week. Whew….it has been a doozy.

We have not had a huge amount of struggle with Natalie, who I fondly call the Sweetness. Up until 18 months of age, she was laid back, just like her daddy. She has always been full of personality, dancing since one of our first sonograms to full-out “dance parties” in our living room, to date. She is our little extrovert.

But even a little ways past 18 months, it was doable.

Now, at 3 years and 7 months, she can give us a run for…the hills? A run for something….anything, but dealing with the concentrated stubbornness of this 3ft-something little girl.

I kid….kind of.

Most days, we’re good. She’s a lot like myself….particular and indecisive. Sounds like a contradiction, huh? Nope….it’s just that we don’t know what we want until it’s right there in front of us, or if we do know what we want, we will fight you for it with everything we have and probably can’t fully focus on anything else until that one thing is accomplished.

Anyways, I believe most of our battles stem from our similarities. It’s hard to face truth about yourself day in and day out, things that you don’t necessarily want published on the front page of your biography. She is definitely a mirror that God has placed in my life to sharpen me. And some days, I don’t want to look. Plain and simple.

Moving on to this past week, however. We faced something that quite honestly we didn’t know what to do with. It started out with Natalie repeatedly asking to go potty at bedtime. After probably the 3rd trip, we were starting to question the validity of her requests and see more of an attempt at delaying the inevitable.

Flash back to the Lamp incident of ’13. (Total meltdown when we removed the lamp from her room that had become her excuse to call us into her room on a nightly basis, to turn on and then turn off and then turn on again. This lasted 2.5 hours until she pretty much screamed herself to sleep.)

Jordan and I looked at each other, and asked if this was ‘another lamp.’ After 8 trips per hour for about 2 hours, we had had enough. I am not going to go into a lot of details, because honestly I don’t want to relive it and also I believe that some things are just for our family. God entrusted us with Natalie for reasons beyond my comprehension (and I am honored to get to steward her life for as long as He allows me to), and I believe built inside of this parenting journey with her are experiences precisely planned and timed to do things in all of us, if we will allow Him access.

Which brings me to my point. We were faced with an intense few days of challenge with Natalie. Challenging our authority. Challenging pretty much anything we had tried thus far concerning discipline techniques.

(And side note for any concerned mommies out there, we did get her checked out at Children’s Healthcare to ensure that nothing physical, like a UTI, was the culprit behind the behavior. Tests were clear.)

We felt utterly powerless at times. I honestly think that I have never prayed for and sought after God’s wisdom as fervently as I did this past week.

It.was.hard.

And after the first evening, laying exhausted in bed and already thinking of all that the next day would hold – lack of sleep, two kids at the house, who knows what emotional state Natalie would wake up in – I found myself falling into a really bad habit that I never really identified until that night. I guess this season has sharpened my vision and made me sensitive to the things that hinder me from embracing what is in front of me, good and bad.

I was sitting there, trying my best to figure out how to escape. Not that I was physically going to leave, although that may have crossed my mind in the thick of it earlier that evening, but just trying to figure out who I could call to come help. What I could do to fix the issue. What needed to change. How could I delegate this issue to someone else.

To put it how I saw it with new eyes that night, how can I disengage from my life right now.

I was already declaring defeat for the next day and it hadn’t even started yet. And what I was subconsciously doing was rejecting that this very day was the Lord’s. He had been with me the whole time. And He still was.

Could it be that He had designed it, allowed it -however you want to say it- to show me something? To tweak something? To break something in me, in Natalie?

(And probably a million other things that I will never see or understand.)

And I was doing my best to try to get out of it.

What blessings have I forfeited because I left the fight too early? That may be a question that haunts me this year.

All this to say, after 3 long days of questioning, praying, crying, conversations with trusted fellow parents, reading other resources, we started to see the pattern break.

We didn’t find a formula. I don’t know that we implemented some new crafty technique that helped (maybe some of it didn’t hurt). I think it was mainly due to that fact that we stood our ground. We put down stakes, so to speak, and decided that we were going to camp out here as long as it takes to get through this together, as a family.

I intentionally decided that night to not fight the situation, but to embrace even this as part of what needed to happen with Natalie. Something had not gone terribly wrong. This was part of it.

Stubborn sin-natures rearing their ugly heads.

Clueless parents that rediscovered how desperately they need a Counselor to guide them in each moment with this amazing blessing of God who needs parents who will direct her in the way she should go.

We found grace in a lot of ways this week. Mostly in that it only lasted 4 days.

But I also feel as though my relationship with Natalie has deepened somehow. Our roles have been more solidified. It’s almost as if we can see her as a little bit more secure, knowing that there are some defined boundaries around these parts.

And you know how a relationship feels closer when you’ve worked through conflict, and you’re willing to stick it out. No emotional disengagement. Not wimping out and compromising what seems right to make things work. You find an intimacy there that you can’t purchase or manufacture any other way, I believe.

I got a dose of that with the Sweetness this week. The little spirited one still has my heart. Completely.

And I got to learn more about it. Priceless lessons. Things not everyone will get to know about my daughter. What a treasure. We actually joked and laughed with each other after all of this in ways we haven’t before. What a sweet reward.

A repeating theme this past week as also been about how there is necessary time between when you plant a seed and when you can reap a harvest. I believe, in God’s goodness, He allowed me to catch a glimpse of the truth of this with Nat.

Galatians 6:9, “And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.“

I desire to one day reap a sweet, meaningful relationship with Natalie. One of sweet fellowship about our personal walks with the Lord and also about completely meaningless things as well. I want to be able to share as much as we can with each other.

(A neat concept, really. Reaping relationships. Kind of a new perspective on that for me.)

To wrap this up…

I fully expect, although not ready to invite, more challenges like this with her.

(All of you who have been parents longer than we have, you can collectively say ‘amen’ here.)

I do hope that we have a little bit of a breather, to be completely honest, because like I said. This week was a doozy.

But I am thankful for what I’ve gained through it, by embracing and not retreating.

The Lord’s faithfulness already at work, 9 days in to the year. Thank you, Jesus.

Have you ever heard something, and didn’t know how much you needed to hear it until you did?

A truth that needed to be confirmed in your life.
A ray of light that revealed a need, a hope, a secret desire.
A spark that reignited a long-forgotten dream.

You start to tear up and it surprises you.

Some seasons I’m sensitive. I can recognize the Holy Spirit’s movement in my life, see His hand in conversations and circumstances that surround me.

Other seasons, I’m distracted. A bit more callous. Caught up in my head, myself.

And yet He still pursues and beckons me. And He speaks. And it catches me off guard.

His truth is confirmed in my innermost spirit, and my response. I cry.

I have always cried in the Presence of the Lord. I cry during worship. I cry when someone speaks a truth that is meant for me or someone that I dearly love. I cry when a friend shares a conviction or a recent disciplining of the Lord.

“-Your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” – Psalm 139:14

Thank you, Lord, for your fierce pursuit of my heart. I long to love you faithfully, but my flesh fails. But you are faithful.