Turn your Facebook usage (or addiction) into something eternally profitable
Do you remember when you first started using Facebook? For me, Facebook came into my life in college, and I embraced it whole-heartedly. It was an amazing and new way to connect with others and to share pictures and moments in our lives. After completing grad school, my husband and I moved to China, and Facebook became an invaluable tool for me to keep in touch with friends and family. However, in July 2009, the Chinese government started to block access to Facebook. That was the moment when I realized that I had a serious Facebook addiction. It wasn’t until it was gone that I realized just how much time I had been spending on it—how much time I had spent posting my own adventures and looking at other people’s lives, and how much time I had spent envying others. Looking at their pictures (all of the directions that their lives had gone or things that they had accomplished or obtained), I had fallen into envy. Rather than rejoicing in what they had, my envy caused me to be dissatisfied with my own life. What’s worse, I didn’t stop looking. I started lurking around Facebook corners, searching for more and more to see until I was watching people who had only the most tenuous connections to me. I had to quit Facebook “cold turkey,” and for a while I felt serious withdrawal. After that, I would occasionally post when I traveled back to the States, but I actually enjoyed my government-mandated freedom from Facebook.
Now that our family has moved to Canada, I have easy access once again, and I’ve had to decide what to do about Facebook. Knowing the addiction I once had, I have come up with a way to make Facebook beneficial in my life, rather than falling back into the pit of envy and media addiction that it once was in my life.
Three reasons to use Facebook to enhance your prayer life
1. Facebook naturally forms a kind of prayer list.
John Piper has written about praying in concentric circles, and I’ve used this method as a way to organize and balance my prayers. In this method, he recommends praying in circles, starting your prayers in the center with those nearest to you, and moving outward to people less closely connected to you. I propose that you make your Facebook connections one of these circles. This is often an appropriate way to respond to people posting directly about struggles, prayer requests, or difficulties that they are facing. For those posting happier moments, we can praise God and thank Him for those things—use Facebook to guide you to “rejoice with those who rejoice” and “weep with those who weep.”
The Facebook homepage creates a sort of revolving prayer sheet. It would be a fantastic outer concentric circle that would help you to pray for believers as well as unbelievers. You could also work through your friend list, helping you to think about these people you have chosen to connect yourself to and making that choice more meaningful and eternally significant.
2. It links your growing prayer habit to a habit that you already have.
If you ask Christians what goals they have for the New Year, most will include improving their prayer life. I’ve written about one way to revitalize your prayer life, but I believe that Facebook could hold a key to another way. The strength of this method may very well be because of the “life hack” of habit stacking: adding a new habit is easier and more likely to stick with if you connect it to a previous habit.
Many of us already have a habit of checking Facebook throughout the day. It may be when you get notifications, or when standing in line, or when sitting down to relax for a minute. If we choose to combine prayer with our current social media habit, we can use the trick of habit stacking to make prayer a more frequent activity throughout our day. (Note: I am not suggesting that these be your only times of prayer! That wouldn’t lend itself to praise, thanksgiving, confession, or personal requests, which are all vital parts of our prayer life. Instead, it would form one of the outer circles of our prayers, one that would be quite easy to add to our daily habits.)
3. It will help you to control the amount of time spent on social media.
My suggestion is that however long you spend on social media, you plan to have a matching amount of prayer time: for every minute you spend browsing a certain post or page on Facebook, you spend one minute in prayer for that person.
Now, when I first had this idea, I thought, “I can’t double the amount of time I spend on social media! That would be crazy!” However, the best part of this plan is that prayer ends up replacing half of the time spent on social media. This is a feature of the design.
We all know that social media can be very, very bad for us. (Here’s an article from The Atlantic that really changed my thinking about social media for myself as well as for my kids.) This plan to pray for every minute I spend on social media is meant to not only increase my prayer time, but also decrease my time spent on social media. We simply can’t do it all, but we know that prayer is an effective and powerful way to spend our time!
The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.
James 5:16b
Our ultimate goal for our prayer life is to pray without ceasing, and I believe that this method can help us work toward that goal.
And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
i Thessalonians 5:14-18
At a Christian camp I attended in high school, one of the preachers described “praying without ceasing” as calling God on the phone and always having the phone line connected to Him. You may walk away from the phone for a minute to do something, but the call is still ongoing, and you’ll go back to it as soon as you have a chance. This beautiful analogy was created before smart phones—could that man have imagined how different phones would be in the future? Today, our phones are constantly connected to us everywhere we go and are able to bring us back to them with a simple buzz notification.
Sadly, in my life, “looking at my smartphone without ceasing” describes me much more accurately than “praying without ceasing.” This way of using social media is one way that I’m trying to reverse that situation.
Other considerations
What if I don’t spend much time on Facebook?
This method can apply to a lot of social media and general media sites we use (maybe not specialty sites like Pinterest—although praying over our hobbies and dreams is certainly useful!). It pairs very practically with text messaging and news scrolling. After having a conversation with someone over messages, stop and spend some time praying for that person! If you spend 15 minutes glancing at headlines, stop and take some time to pray over the ways that those headlines affect your heart, or what’s happening in the lives of the needy and oppressed that you may just have read about.
What about the time I spend posting on Facebook rather than looking at others’ posts?
Some of us spend more time curating our own photos or posting our thoughts throughout the day. What if we prayed over these posts? They are influencing people. We can ask God what kinds of posts He wants us to display that could glorify Him or have eternal significance. Does my post present an overwhelming opportunity for others to be tempted with envy, FOMO, or discouragement? Before I post, I want to imagine the loneliest person at my church reading my post—what would be his or her response? I want to display the beautiful, God-given stages of our family so that I can share that with other family members. But I need to remember that people from all kinds of situations see my posts. I want to consider how to create content that points people to God rather than cause them to face significant temptations and discouragement. I want to pray over my posts, even simply praying for the people in the images as I’m posting.
Be led by truth
We can look to Scripture to guide our use of social media. Because at its core, social media ought to be about relationships, we can use it as a way to reach others, stay connected to people, and live out the commands and warnings of Romans 12.
Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.
Romans 12:9-18
We can use social media to know more about others and help us to “rejoice with those who rejoice” and “weep with those who weep.” That is one God-honoring way to use it. Others will present themselves as we pray and keep in step with the Spirit. We can decide to use social media this way!
Do you have any questions or suggestions about this topic? Please make a comment below.
Suggested Reading:
“With his trademark insights and energy, Keller offers biblical guidance as well as specific prayers for certain situations, such as dealing with grief, loss, love, and forgiveness. He discusses ways to make prayers more personal and powerful, and how to establish a practice of prayer that works for each reader.” (Amazon description)
“Drawing from the insights of numerous thinkers, published studies, and his own research, writer Tony Reinke identifies twelve potent ways our smartphones have changed us―for good and bad. Reinke calls us to cultivate wise thinking and healthy habits in the digital age, encouraging us to maximize the many blessings, avoid the various pitfalls, and wisely wield the most powerful gadget of human connection ever unleashed.” (Amazon description)
“In a culture where online communications and communities can be set up in seconds, it is striking that loneliness is still rampant. Even in the church, a place where we might hope for an oasis of love and acceptance, we can find interactions awkward and superficial. It’s for this reason that Vaughan Roberts takes us back to the Bible, and challenges us to consider our need for true friendship. He’s both honest and clear in his approach as he shows us that knowing and being known by God is the hope we need to begin to deal with the sickness of our ‘self–love’ society.”
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