My Social Media-less Life

The Lord has prevented me from blogging so much because I was doing it for the wrong reasons. Those reasons are the same reasons He asked me to get off social media.

So, this blog has been here for the most part untouched while the Lord and I discuss what exactly it is I’m supposed to be doing with this blog if it’s not telling people what’s going on in my life.

Over the past week I’ve been thinking about my response to correction, and then the Lord told me that I was now ready to write a blog because I don’t want to. Not about this anyway. And I realize this is all sounding very vague and that’s kind of the point. It’s my form of written procrastination. 😛

See, I’ve had this issue that really affects all of us. Some of us, it affects more than others. But we all struggle with it in some way. What is that issue?

Pride.

Plain and simple. It’s pride.

It’s thinking I know better than someone else because it’s better than admitting they might actually know better because they’ve gone through what they’re currently trying to help me through.

So today, I finally listened to the Lord when He said, “That ‘issue’ you’ve been having with other people trying to help you is called pride. That’s what it looks like. The stubbornness you’ve been exhibiting is just pride. Your resistance to new and ‘updated’ information is pride. That’s all it is.”

And then He told me He wanted me to write a blog about it.

“But why though?” I asked, and then realized that was the same resistance He was just talking about.

“Exactly,” was all I heard Him say.

Therefore… I sit here 3 hours after the aforementioned conversation, writing a blog.

So what took me so long to realize it was pride? I mean, aside from the fact that the very thing I was ignoring is also what’s causing me to ignore it and blame everyone else for the issues I’m having?

Ultimately, I was finally open enough to the Lord that I was willing to take any answer if it would help me not be such a terrible person when someone would try to correct me.

And it was also the fact that when the Lord finally revealed it to me, I got mad. (If someone confronts you with an issue they see in your life and they’re doing it in love, but you still get mad at them, that’s a good sign that you’re struggling with that issue.) I would just like to point out that getting mad at the Lord has never once turned out well for anyone.

That’s not to say that people haven’t grown from their experiences of being mad at God. My mom is a living testament of that. She was mad at God for a whole year and she still led people to the Lord during that time. But what more could have happened in that time had she been open to what the Lord was wanting to do through her and through our family at that time?

What more could I have done (or could be doing now) had I not been so angry about something as small as “maybe you should use this to clean the shower instead of what you’ve been using because that’s just not getting the job wholly done”?

(And yes, more often than not, my days are filled with resisting suggestions on how to clean than something so life-changing as moving across the country or taking a very long trip somewhere)

There are other things that I resist that aren’t just about cleaning… but if I can’t take suggestions on something small, how can the Lord work on me with something bigger? He can’t. And I’m stuck being mad at my mom (the one usually suggesting better ways to clean), the Lord and myself because I feel like I’m not going anywhere spiritually.

“Whose fault is that, Erica?”

It’s mine. The fault is all mine.

Admitting that, along with allowing myself to be confronted with my “confident wrongness” and being willing to change are great first steps to a better life with other people and with the Lord.

Lord, keep me humble as I learn to follow You more closely.

“Pride goes before destruction, and haughtiness before a fall.” — Proverbs 16:18, NLT