My Social Media-less Life

A few days ago, we had to put Foxxy (the dog pictured above, standing on my mom’s front porch) down. She was about 14 and it was just… time to let her go.

I had emotionally let Foxxy go a few months ago when her hips started to go out, but for my mom, it wasn’t the time yet. And even the day we put her down, it was still hard for my mom. She was a part of Mom’s pack and it’s never easy to say goodbye to a family member… especially one that brought so much joy, even in the face of all the dumb things the dog did.

Foxxy will be missed, but I’d also be lying if I said I wasn’t ready for her to go.

In further updates…

The Lord had me “downgrade” my phone. Again.

I definitely still have an iPhone 13, but I moved the color scheme to gray scale, deleted ALL games from my phone, deleted the YouTube app (I was averaging about as many hours on it as I was on socials), and turned off notifications for apps that weren’t strictly for business or “utility” purposes.

What caused me to do that, you ask? Well, a number of factors. The first of which is the most important: The Lord wanted me to. However, Erica was being hard-headed and chose not to listen.

And then I listened to a podcast where the guest of the pod was a guy who recently wrote a book about a 40-day digital fast he and his church did. And the Lord gently nudged me with: “You know I’ve been asking you to do a lot of these things for some time, but you’ve been ignoring Me. We can’t go deeper together if you’re not giving Me access to ALL areas of your life.”

Well, dang.

Even as I was typing out this post, I felt the Lord reveal to me that I needed to get rid of some of the financial things that were specifically tied to YouTube.

I gotta be honest, when I started typing out this post, it wasn’t supposed to be another grieving post, but here we are again… grieving over the loss of something as silly as YouTube.

One of the creators I’ve followed for LITERALLY all of my adult life, BlimeyCow, is of course, strictly YouTube. The Lord has allowed me to continue financially supporting them, and only them of the creators on YouTube I supported. On the community website BlimeyCow has set up, I messaged them directly and said, “Hey, I won’t be on YouTube for the foreseeable future, but I will still be supporting you and your work!” Since the one I messaged has young kids, I’m sure he’s in bed so I don’t expect a response until tomorrow morning.

But that was one of the hardest things I’ve had to write in a while.

As I told one of my cleaning clients yesterday, I give the decision-making responsibility to the Lord and it does ultimately make me happier and more at peace.

But the road to get from deletion to peace is a heckin hard one.