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I grew up in a wonderful little town in the panhandle of Texas (population 2000). It was the world for me. I could ride my bike across town to my friend’s houses and I played every sport in school (so we could field a team)…not much happened in town without everybody knowing. That all changed after my freshman year of high school when we moved to a city where my new high school had 2000 kids! I spent a year making my parents pay for the move all the while desperately planning the return to my comfortable world.

I made the return trip to west Texas by going to college in Lubbock at Texas Tech University. I was excited but still very much apprehensive about moving to such a big city. After graduating, I married and moved to the METROPLEX of Dallas/Fort Worth to take a job in banking. I still remember the joy of being newly married and getting an incredible job, but there were still large clouds of anxiety given the new world I was moving into.

None of those changes compared to the monumental change I have been going through for about a year and a half now…my move into the world of Social Media.

The size, and more importantly, the impact that Social Media is having (and will continue having) on my life already surpasses all of the physical moves I have made up to this point. That’s without having to send out a single “change of address”…much less loading and unloading the moving van. As with the other moves, it has not been without tremendous fear and doubt. Questions like…

• Am I giving up my privacy?
• Why would anyone else care what I think?
• Is this all a waste of time?

…have haunted me for about a year. You see, I am a Baby Boomer. Not many of my peers have jumped over to the other side of this new world with both feet.  Why would they?  For forty-something years…their window to the rest of the world was delivered to their front yard rolled up with a rubber band while they slept; it’s very hard to let that go. It’s extremely hard to grasp how close you are to the rest of the world…inside of your house!  

Social Media has taught me some things that I saw in other places but didn’t fully grasp…things like:

• The true value of people’s stories
• The incredible power of sharing information
• The ability to meet the needs of others on the other side of the world… with only a  click
• The fragile art of connecting to others

Though at times, my moves have been a scary and sometimes lonely trek, as with all of the other moves I have made in my life (with the exception of the first), I have never wanted to go back!

The crazy thing is that this giant Social Media movement is the very thing that has allowed me to reconnect to all the people and places that I used to know…

Have you ever moved? Was it scary?

Jesus told us to be IN the world but not OF the world…

What does that mean? How do you do it? I have spent most of my life striving to avoid worldly things by going to church on Sunday, hanging with the “right” people, not being caught in the wrong places, listening to the ”right” music and generally following the Christian “dos” and “don’ts”. When I haven’t followed them…I spent significant energy making sure none of my Christian friends knew I had been less than the image I had painted for them. So up till now…I have spent most of my time making sure I was not IN the world and when I slipped up and got IN it, I covered well.

I am growing really tired of living that way. Sunday morning is more stressful than Monday morning. We have made being a good Christian all about finding the right church or pastor to associate ourselves with. We are kind of obsessed with getting OUT of the world.

Don’t get me wrong…I truly agree we are to have other believers around us, building each other up. The genuine and humble Christian friends I have are the people that inspire me and  in part move me to be a genuine and humble Christian. Problem is…that has been 99.9% of our focus and it takes us OUT of the world. It is much more comfortable to stay in a circle of people that think, believe and agree with us.

But Jesus has called us to be IN the world…

Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments section below. We will talk more about the OF part next time and maybe discuss some ways we can follow through on Jesus’ request/command.