Today (10/11/12 by the way) marks the end of my 40 day fast from Facebook and my focus on praying for and reconnecting with some important people in my life. Here's a quick run down of the various groups of people that were involved, followed by some brief thoughts about successes and failures and the whole experience in general.
5-8 Parents (mine and Kim's)
9-10 Grandparents (mine and Kim's)
11-15 Siblings (mine and Kim's)
16-20 Best friends (just mine)
21-24 People from Community Christian Church in Ft. Lauderdale
25-28 People from churches that I have served in the past 10+ years
29-30 Professors and friends from Florida Christian College
31-40 People at my current church, First Christian Church in Erwin, TN
All listed out like that it probably looks like each of the past 40 days for me have been a thoughtful and meaningful stroll down memory lane. The truth is, the past 40 days have been a tangible reminder of my incredible lack of focus and discipline in simple things like praying and connecting with people I care about. I had already prepared for some distractions to begin around day 7, because of a retreat that I would be going to. I came back from that planning to get back on track around day 10. I did OK through day 14 or 15, then by 16 or so I was doing little more than trying to remember to pray for the people I had scheduled for that day and all the ones I had missed so far. I did almost none of what I originally had in mind to reconnect with some people and near the end even many of my prayers have been relatively quick and shallow. Discipline is hard!
Some good news of the whole experience though is that I did faithfully stay completely off of Facebook for the entire 40 days. It was difficult on a few occasions, specifically some things related to my work when I might have been able to communicate something with a person or group more easily than I ended up doing. I also found myself wanting to talk about some experience or share some opinion on current events or post some link to something and not having an easy outlet to do so with Facebook on lock down. Overall though, I didn't really miss it that much, and there were plenty of other things available to do with my family or to waste time with (like Fantasy Football).
Despite not doing quite as much as I planned, the past 40 days have really been a meaningful time to at least acknowledge some of the important people in my life in a small way. Everyone on "the list" was thought of and prayed for at least once in that time, and I'm not entirely giving up on my original ideas to reconnect with people, even though the official 40 days has passed. I highly recommend to others the practice of fasting from something unimportant in order to make room for things that are important but tend to get squeezed out of your schedule. It was a useful experience, even if I was not entirely successful. In fact, my failure at it may be the most useful thing about it. I learned from it and will work at improving some things that are still lacking in my spiritual life.
Thanks for reading! In my next post I'll tell you all about my new smartphone and how I'll be living my wildest nerd dreams AND saving over $1680 in the next two years over typical unlimited smartphone plans. Sadly I'm not even joking about this. My first time back from the Facebook was with my newest distraction. Hosanna Lord! :-D
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