Sometimes we struggle to know what our calling is in life. Lately, God has been making it abundantly clear to me, first by showing me what it’s not.

God is not calling me to be a Facebook Crusader, as tempting as it may be sometimes when that politically-charged status or glaringly-wrong article pops up in my newsfeed and everything within me at that very moment is screaming “This! This is important! This is urgent! I must respond! I must set the record straight!” It’s hard to pry my anxious fingers away from the keyboard, but I must. God isn’t calling me to be a debater. He’s called me to be His. A servant and an encourager. A wife and a mother. So it naturally follows that the people that need my service and encouragement the most are the people who live with me—not the people sharing pixels with me on my computer screen.

Many times I have finally walked away from the screen at the end of a day in which I’ve wasted so much time and mental energy on things that aren’t any of my business, only to find that I have greater anxiety and insecurity (What if they misunderstood me? Did I say that in just the right way?), guilt and shame (Oh boy, look at those dishes piled up—I forgot about those.), and utter emptiness because I’ve been investing in ideas rather than in people (or at times I’ve confused the two). Lately, this emptiness has led me to see that I want Jesus more than I want more information, and to be pleasing Him more than to be understood by others. The story of Mary and Martha comes to mind. In all of Martha’s distraction, she had missed the most important part—sitting at the feet of Jesus, listening to Him, enjoying His presence. I’m thankful for the changes God is making in my heart, but still that sudden urge comes up sometimes as quickly as my newsfeed refreshes. With another post. Another article.

I love the free exchange of information. I love to share things I have found thought-provoking and interesting. And I’m not afraid of controversial subjects. But these things are not what I live for, they are not my calling, and the longer I live the more I realize that my time here is short, my opportunities to do what really matters are limited by my indulgence in the things that don’t.

At times these thoughts have led me to take a Facebook hiatus. I’m a bit of an all-or-nothing girl, so radical amputation has often been my modus operandi. But Facebook isn’t the problem. My “friends” on Facebook and their posts or the articles that come across the web aren’t the problem. My heart is.

On my most recent episode of “Someone is wrong on the internet”, I found myself at last pried away from the computer and finally unloading the dishwasher while grumbling, “There’s just so much wrong with the world!” Within a few minutes a song came to mind. It’s a good reminder that the problem I must pay the most attention to is…me.