My Social Media-less Life

What this post was going to be and what it has become are two very different things, but I know now all the procrastinating was for a reason. The above pictures are from my annual trip to South Bend, Indiana, with my best friends… what this post is now going to be about is none of that, but you can enjoy the pictures anyway. 🙂

This morning I woke up to an email from an international friend I met on a Facebook group long enough ago that the distance never mattered in our friendship; we just have such different lives that we didn’t talk nearly as much as other friends I met around the same time in the same group.

This particular friend was also one that was willing to give me contact information while I was in the process of leaving social media so I of course made it a point to keep her in mind when I was feeling down about the lack of 1100 followers I no longer had.

And then this morning, for the first time in about 10 months, I got an update from her!

I always give grace to my international friends since their days happen when I’m sleeping and vice versa, and I know how emails work. If their email accounts are anything like mine, the emails they most likely want to see quickly get buried under the things they don’t even remotely care about.

Including emails from friends.

So the fact that we hadn’t corresponded since Christmas was irrelevant; another international friend of mine is married with a child and lives in New Zealand, and I ONLY hear from her around the holidays (Christmas and New Year’s and sometimes our birthdays).

Getting the email this morning (and then a quick follow-up when she followed my blog and read one of the more recent posts!) helped me to realize something that I had actually just been speaking with the Lord about: What is going on in the world?

As an American, I have the unfortunate privilege of getting caught up only in the goings-on of the USA and forget there’s a huge world full of people who are working and living and traveling and learning, just like I am.

In some ways (like in the case of both of the international friends I’ve mentioned in this post), their “traveling” part is far more international than my “traveling” no more than 500 or so miles from my home base… in my defense, the United States is a really big country.

However, the Lord reminded me that not only is there a whole world full of people, but there are a whole lot of His followers– Christians– doing His will and learning how to live the way He wants them to live.

The friend that emailed me this morning shared the entire journey she’s had since June of 2022 and how the Lord was leading her to pick up everything and move. Or, as she shared because she read my post about The Purge, she actually got rid of all of the superfluous things she owned and basically left with enough clothes to pack in a suitcase and a few other essentials.

Talk about a Purge.

It helped me to remember that God is still working in people’s lives and the people I’ve talked to lately have all been going through a “Purge” of sorts, so it’s okay to feel a little uncomfortable… because that just means more growing will happen soon.