Missed Part I on Monday? Grab it here–and make sure to come back for the social media giveaway on Friday!
4. If social media is to love others, it’s gotta stay in its proper place. I highly value this post on 6 Ways Your Smartphone Is Changing You, in which the author asserts that our smartphones can take the place of embodiment—of simply being fully present with the real, live folks around us.
Confession: I have a love/hate relationship with social media.
Love: Part of it feels like that old gameshow, “This is Your Life” (though I confess to only seeing the Sesame Street version with Guy Smiley). I love connecting to people with whom I attended Sowers Elementary, when I had eighties hair. To my refugee students whose wide, blindingly-white grins I miss from Refuge and Hope.
My dad used to joke about being a “minority in a sorority”. It was fairly legit: We were four girls, plus my mom—and even the dog was a girl.
Imagine my (joyful) alarm when the sonogram of my first child revealed that I was about to plunge into the world of testosterone, sweat, dirt, and Nerf weapons (the latter of which I have now lost count). In fact three of my four kiddos are boys.
Missed Part I? First, grab it here.
When you felt like you were finally surfacing from burnout–or as I called it, tired-mad, I might tell you what I found out. That sometimes burnout is simply burnout, because life is hard. And even though God never gives us more than He’ll give us strength to handle (He says so here and here), it still can feel like a rightful scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel, ta-da-I-survived type thing. (Whether it’s godly or not to be burned out is another post for another time, perhaps. But pretending it’s not there doesn’t really help.)
I glimpsed it in the slight tightness, the fatigued determination of her face that day: that distinct weariness that comes from herding toddlers and preschoolers 24/7. Having worn that particular look for approximately eight years myself, I know it well.
And though there are few exhaustions like young-mom exhaustion—I felt my own version of tired-mad that week. (Um. My family may have felt it, too.) One of my favorite takeaways from the movie Home were those hybrid-emotions, like sad-mad. Anger is a secondary emotion anyway, right? We feel angry usually because we were first hurt; afraid; grieved. Depleted, taken for granted; so very tired. So I have to plunge my fingers into my anger, exploring a bit.
Today’s quotable is from Elisabeth Elliot–with a free chalkboard printable of this anchoring truth:
The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances.
Around the world, so many of us are grieving this senseless tragedy in Orlando, trying to make evil fit into a narrative that would make sense. Beginning on Monday morning, I’ve felt myself pushing against that gray, shapeless mass that is anxiety–for a number of personal reasons, not the least of which are these heart-rending events in my home country. Though I don’t feel my voice would add something unique to the reaction, after talking with our kids on Monday evening and praying together as a family, I found my friend Kristen’s post, Dear Kids: It’s a Sad Day in America, to be a good word.
My anxiety doesn’t compare to what many are mourning right now, and I continue to pray for Orlando families and churches. But perhaps you can identify with some of these thoughts as we confront fears of all dimensions. -Janel
Parenting is…overwhelming sometimes pretty much all the time. Last night I recognized a sensation creeping over me with shadowy fingers, as my thoughts slammed into my kids’ schooling and implementing solutions for my son’s ADHD and appalling, heart-rending current events: anxiety. If I were to have drawn my heart, it may have looked like this:
I am okay, I think, with not being my sons’ hero. I am even more okay with this because that spot has been occupied by their dad—since, oh, I finished nursing.
My husband is a wonderfully different kind of Good Dad to my brand of Mom-ness. When we moved to Africa, one of his first priorities was a rug for the tile floor—for wrestling, of course. He’s the kind of guy who grabs the Nerf football every once in awhile when he gets home from work, who initiates a family dance party, and yet who leverages that rapport to turn a child by the shoulder, look them in the eye, and state calmly, You need to speak respectfully to your mom.
“I am still tempted to assess the ‘good’ of a day by whether it pleased me versus whether I pleased God and was loving toward others. I am still tempted to live as if I own my life and still fail to remember that I was bought with a price…
“When you’re living for you, the call to love others is always a burden for you.”
New to these questions? See these notes first, along with Set #1 .
Like these? Consider subscribing to A Generous Grace and receive a FREE E-BOOK of Discussion Questions to Better Understand Your Family’s Subculture. They’re great to process with a friend, spouse, or small group.
![Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language](https://www.janelbreitenstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/love-languages-text-1.jpg "Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language")
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