I came across this awesome article that was posted on Relevant. It can be super easy to make a weird choice about what we end up posting on social media and the result can really bite us on the butt! This article covers multiple dangers of posting. Here is my favorite point from the article:
4. Is this a moment to protect?
When my son crawls into my lap, he doesn’t want me to take his picture and shoot it across Facebook. He doesn’t care who else thinks I have a cute kid. He just wants me to hold him and see him. To feel his soft, chunky arms and to focus on the way his eyelashes move when he blinks.
When we interrupt lunch with a friend in order to quote her on Twitter, we invite hundreds of people into a conversation that could have been sacred; and we miss the sweet memories that may have formed had her words remained simply between the two of us.
Not every great moment needs to be shared. In fact, some of the best times are most enjoyed privately. If we suspend the present in an attempt to capture its beauty in 140 characters or less, we sacrifice our experience of the moment itself. We also rob each other of something that has been lost in our digital age—keeping a handful of memories between us and those we are closest to, or even just between us and God.
Especially with Instagram, I don’t think we do a great job at protecting moments. Posting during those special moments in our youth ministry keeps us from being fully present, but sometimes we feel this odd need to–but why? I think we often say, “I want to share what God is doing in our ministry,” but we really need to be examining our hearts with that. We need to make sure we aren’t posting things to say, “Look how great my ministry is,” “Look what I did,” or “Look at how much students love me.”
In the pursuit of protecting moments, we find that we really need to be protecting our hearts. There is probably a follow up blog coming up about this soon.
Colton
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