I’m So Important… NOT!!!  

“Today I am drinking my passion fruit unsweet tea.  What a great taste of summer…in January.  Come on summer… hurry up and get here!”

Really.  Who the heck cares….right?  I realize that a year ago, I would have posted that I had just made passion fruit unsweet tea and was now drinking it and it was January.  This is the summertime tea for me and for some reason, I would feel the need to post on Facebook and Instagram about my drink of choice. Seriously? Am I really THAT important? Do you guys really care about what  I’m drinking? No. You really don’t. You want me to care about you. You want me to love you. You really don’t care about the tea I drink, the clothes I wear, the shampoo I use, or even the fact that I am going to bed because I am tired. None of that matters a hill of beans.

What really matters is that I pour into the people that are closest to me. That I really am deliberate (yep, there’s my 2018 word) in my relationships with my friends in town. I heard Charlotte Gambrill speak on Sunday night and she talked about Nehemiah and his calling to rebuild the wall. Within that story, she told us that when Nehemiah directed people to start rebuilding the wall, he instructed them to worry about what was in front of their house only. While we need to work on our own “front yard” first (see Matthew 7:5), we can take this a step further and should take a long hard look at our lives to see what are we doing right outside of our own door to care for our community.

What are YOU doing to make your neighborhood better?  (and trust me, this applies to me as well!!) Are you rolling up your sleeves and helping your neighbor? Yes this gets us out of our comfort zone, I wrote about that here…But comfort zones and helping my neighbor is what we are called to do.  Help each other.

But wait.  What is my “neighbor” drives me crazy?  Good question.  Here’s the answer – pray for them.  Pray that God would open your eyes to see them as HE sees them.  I promise you that this prayer will work!  I’ve seen it work multiple times.  Both in my life and my children’s lives.  That’s what it means to be more like Christ.  1 John 3:23 says “And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another just as he has commanded us.”  I promise you that you cannot effectively love one another on facebook.  I have learned this first-hand.  You might think you can, but you can’t.  Loving one another is getting messy and crazy and doing life together… physically together.

Boy howdy, that was a rant from posting tea pictures to serving the community.  But I swear, the longer I’m off Facebook, the more I’m convinced that it is a ME magnet.  It absolutely makes us narcissistic!  So, get off social media and get into the people that live around you!  You will be blessed by your actions more so than clicking “like”!!