I don’t know how many of you out there participate in giving something up for lent, but if you are, how about Facebook. Really, that’s just what a WallStreet Journal Report is talking about. Here’s a bit of it:
Ms. Wentland, who is 38, recently got in touch with a guy she had last seen three decades ago when, at the age of nine, they acted in a school play together. Within the comfy confines of Facebook’s blue-and-white pages, he confided he’d once had a crush on her.
That was a total rush — until Ms. Wentland paused to ponder the point of such ephemeral connections. They were fun, yes, but they took up more time than she cared to calculate. It had been ages since she’d sat on the floor and played trains with her six-year-old son or baked cookies with her three-year-old daughter.
“I have a real life here, with children, a husband and a job. They need my attention and energy,” Ms. Wentland says.
A few months ago, she tried to limit herself to online networking once a week. Facebook Friday, she called it. “I don’t think it lasted a week,” Ms. Wentland says. “I just couldn’t do it.”
She’s hopeful that putting her renunciation of Facebook in the spiritual context of Lent will help. She plans to use some of the time she would have spent online in prayerful reflection. She’s also joined an online quitting-Facebook-for-Lent support group. (Since the group is hosted on Facebook, none of the members — in theory, at least — will be logging on to comfort one another during their days of trial.)
College students who have abstained from Facebook for Lent in recent years say it was brutal, but valuable. Whitley Leiss, now a junior at Texas Christian University, slipped up only once, on her birthday, when she was desperate to see the well-wishes posted for her. She asked a roommate to log into her account and read them aloud while she averted her eyes from the screen. When Lent ended, she logged on to find dozens of messages waiting and strangely little desire to answer them.
“I saw all that I had missed,” Ms. Leiss said. “And I realized I hadn’t missed anything.” She also learned, she says, who her true friends were — those who would take the radically retro step of calling or emailing to stay in touch.
What do you think? Do you need to limit your social networking to refocus your spiritual life?
I’m just glad this was about Facebook, and not Twitter.
LINK: Status: Dad Wonders If He Can Last All of Lent Without Facebook
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