My Social Media-less Life

As you can see from the above picture and caption, I just finished downsizing and rearranging my bedroom tonight!

I gotta be honest, I really thought I would be able to get away with not moving my desk, but I realized… if the reason I’m doing all of this is to be obedient, then I HAVE to be obedient.

So I moved my desk and honestly… I like this setup a lot better than I thought I would. Still working on being okay with that empty corner by the window, but it won’t be filled up anytime soon. I have other things to focus on for the time being.

Surprise! That’s the perfect segue into the whole reason I’m blogging at almost midnight.

Over the course of my life, I’ve had a lot of what I would call “almost big breaks.” Or what I would currently call “big breaks adjacent.”

What are those? You might ask. They are instances where the situation could have been happening to you had you been there, but instead they happened to someone else. In my case, the “someone else’s” have been people who were friends of mine, or even family members.

Many of these things aren’t really anything worth speaking about; most of the time they’re silly things, like not getting picked first for the dodgeball team or missing out on being “choral vocals” on a music track. Things that are like, “Well, it’s not like those situations can’t change at some point, so I’ll just make sure I’m a little bit more seen and heard next time.”

At some point, you stop playing dodgeball on a regular basis, and those friends that were your inside track to being on one of their songs (or a friend’s song) moves away.

In short, life goes on.

I wouldn’t call those situations and the feelings I have regret necessarily, but they are situations that I usually have to wrestle things out with the Lord.
“Am I just wanting to be noticed, or is that really something I should have done? It would be nice if people noticed me from time to time. Is that a bad thing to want?”

Basically, I have a mini-existential crisis until the Lord reminds me (it used to be gently, but lately He’s had to beat me upside the head metaphorically), “Erica, your calling is different than that.”

As any frustrated young adult might ask in that moment, I would grumble, “Then WHAT is my calling?” Usually the answer would come in some kind of mental reminder about what I really love to do, where I would then grumble-grumble about how it would be nice to be recognized from time to time either way.

“Wait, what do you love to do, Erica?” Wow, you’re just asking all the right questions tonight! The ultimate reason I do what I do– from cleaning houses, to watching animals, to hanging out with the people I do– is because I love to help people.*

*What I mean by “hanging out with the people [I hang out with]” doesn’t mean I see everyone as some problem to be solved or basket-case that needs my help. Sometimes my “helping” someone is simply sitting with them in silence for hours at a time or letting them talk because they trust me enough to say all the things. Since I felt the need to put the caveat in here.

When someone asks me what I would do if money were no object (or I think of what I would do with all the money I’d win if I ever won the lottery), my first thought is to get my friends and family out of debt. First of all, I don’t need all that money anyway. Second, helping people brings me great joy. Giving them a large sum of money is certainly going to help… plus, they ALSO would be full of joy at that point.

Sometimes it bugs me that I can’t help as much as I would like to monetarily, but I know I can help with my time and my talents. And as my mom recently reminded me, the people in my life that I encounter everyday don’t NEED my money anyway; what they need is someone’s time.

Shifting the topic just slightly…

Over the course of the last several months, a few of my friends have had a recent bump in their… visibility, for lack of a better word at the moment. One day, they were just “normies”… and then, they were called on to be a regular fixture in our weekly prayer services. In our church, it’s not as easy as it might sound to be on the prayer team, but they were singled out.

Since I’ve been coming to these same prayer services fairly consistently for the same amount of time, I struggled with that for a few days. Since it’s been some months and my life took a different direction where I’m not at every service like I used to be, I have obviously made my peace with the situation and realize that was the Lord’s doing.

For another story, I have another friend who has a gift for taking an idea one gives her and making it her own. On the surface, that sounds like a true creative master; and she is one of those for sure. Sometimes it can be a bit frustrating to talk to her however, because she also has a tendency to forget that I may have already told her the exact thing she’s now telling me… but it’s also fun to watch her “grow into” whatever the idea might be and truly make it her own. That really is a true creative master…

That last story happened tonight and although I am not mad about our conversation since it was a continuation of sorts from something we’ve been talking about since February, I did realize that I still have some of those very childish (though very valid) feelings of not being good enough. Not being seen. Not being heard.

Or not being in the right place at the right time, as in the case of the first instance.

Over the course of the last 3 weeks (or however long it’s been since I started cleaning out my room), I’ve been talking with the Lord a lot more since we’ve been on more “immediate” answering terms than usual. More than once, He’s had to remind me that my purpose– at this stage in my life at least– is not to be seen or heard.

The purpose of my life right now is to be obedient.

If that includes being seen, then it includes being seen. But for now, it includes helping people in the way I know how: to be there for them in whatever capacity they need from me… and maybe not making such a big deal about a silly game like dodgeball.