If you are like me, somewhere in communal Africa, owning a smartphone, part of a WhatsApp group consisting of old friends, you know the pressure. 

Photo by Peace Alberto Iteriteka: https://www.pexels.com/photo/men-and-women-wit-kids-1102570/

These are friends you once enjoyed a deep relationship with, some called you nicknames, and they still do, your identity was partly forged among them.

When you scroll, you notice they now have babies, some high school friends-once thin, with cheekbones, are now a little plum and chubby. Others took on more exercise and their new size is as thin as the letter “I” on their Instagram. 

Basically, life brought many changes in between when you last met, and social media is the way you kind of “keep in touch.” (Disclaimer: you may not relate to this at all if you are still in your early 20s)

But now, 

You have three kids, and every 6 years or so, you bump into one former classmate at a wedding reception, or at the bus terminal, and you reminisce about what life was, but that is usually it!

You quickly retreat to your normal life after those town encounters, almost by default, that normal life is the one God has called you to, the kind you will probably reminisce about, five years from now. 

Yet that “normal” life is also easy to Ignore now, to take for granted, it has an annoying workmate, a spouse, constant diaper changes, dropping kids and picking them, it’s kind of the life we are most disinterested in investing in, yet it’s the life God is calling you to optimize, by grace. 

Meantime, dangerously lying low in the nearby digital thickets is a smartphone invitation to be part of a community, an online community, enticing notifications calling you to join groups of these same old friends, friends I last saw at their wedding, friends whose babies I’ve never held. Friends who are busy ignoring their current friends as they are preoccupied with my social feed

This is the maddening cycle of our hyper-digital age. The neglect of ordinary living and the embrace of super-ficial-ordinary life that prioritizes the distant and belittles the nearby. Living that suggests you must keep in touch with everyone you have ever met in life, all the time, in the same way. 

But the implications of glorifying God with your body may mean that you start recognizing you have one frame, and it’s not omnipresent.

Learning to steward it in ways that honor and maximize where God has placed you this week, this month, this year. Otherwise, if I continue like this, I risk stretching, not only thin but silly. 

This may for have implications on what evening meetings I commit to, which church program I sign up for, which committee I join, or which wedding meetings I “press” through. 

Life is really short indeed, one day (hopefully not sooner 🙂 ) people are going to be dropping handfuls of soil on our caskets, I hope those who do so, get to reminisce that your life was marked by full and active presence within the few days God allowed you on earth. 

For now, we can sigh at the thought of (gladly) not being omnipresent, pressured to be accountable to everyone that ever crossed our paths, we can learn to appreciate (and worship better), having recognized that we can only be in one place at a time, unlike God, and that’s supposed to be a healthy thing – not an abnormal thing social media often pushes us to ignore.