I met Tim Challies the other night.
I sort of knew who he was–that blogger guy with the pencil-sketched face header. He was around way back when people first thought they had something to say on the internet. If you look at the bottom of his blog today, it boasts a 5,000-plus daily blog posting streak. He hasn’t skipped a day in over thirteen years or so.
Challies was in town to give his talk on families, technology, and the dangers of porn. I didn’t go to the event to watch him speak. Honestly, I just wanted to know how he felt about writing these days. I wanted to know what he thought about major publishers, marketing, reviewing and endorsing books and the like. So after the crowd dwindled, I wiped my sweaty hands on my pants and reached out to shake his hand. He’s a published author with Zondervan. I guess that’s why I felt nervous. It wasn’t like I expected to pitch my book to him–I mostly wanted to hear if he thought this dream life of writing and publishing lived up to the picture I’d painted in my mind.
And you know what he said? After you write the first book, the publisher doesn’t really care about what you want to write. They want you to write what they want you to write.
Much of this blog writing business has me feeling like Will Smith in the movie I Am Legend. I’m just running out to the harbor to turn my radio to all its frequencies and see if anyone else is out there. Does anyone else see, feel, hear, struggle with the things I do? And if I hear only crickets and crackles, I shove my radio back in my coat and rush back to the fortress of my mind where it’s safe and locked down.
I always text a good friend and inform her the post is up and I’ve stuck my head back in the sand where it belongs. Ashamed? No. Terrified? Yes. Hopeful? Absolutely.
I hate it. I love it. Everything about it scares me and makes me feel more exposed than I’ve ever felt. Sometimes I’ll re-read what I’ve written and feel like a huge jerk. I’m a broken vessel, and everybody knows it. I’m writing a manuscript–I guess you could call it that–on Silence in the age of Loud, and so everything I post online feels like a bit of a betrayal. Who in their right mind has the right to write on keeping their mouth shut? Probably not me. But still I was thinking I’d build a platform, and that’d make it all ok.
The other night, Challies spoke about the dangers of pornography, the accessibility of it, the necessity for parents to open their eyes and make a plan to combat it. All I could think about was that pornography has no grip on me. It holds no interest.
However, if I replaced the word pornography with the word attention, and specifically, social media, I’d have to admit it: I’m addicted. No eye has their fill of seeing, and no ear their fill of hearing. (Eccl. 1:8)
Guilty as charged. I keep coming back. I want to score that book deal.
Challies said people go to the internet to compare themselves to other people. If a person stacks up better than their opponent, they leave feeling proud. If they don’t measure up, they leave feeling envious. Both are a recipe for bitterness. Neither one is something to brag about.
For most addicts, they get to the point of life or death before they decide to cut themselves free. I’d say it is a good test to separate oneself from the temptation before it becomes a full-on habit to spend hours and hours online. Is it any different than porn, this compulsion to keep satisfying the eye which is never satisfied? When did this little tool for keeping in touch become such a hot magnet in my hands? Where did I get this notion that if I don’t promote myself, no one will?
I quit Instagram a few weeks ago. I hadn’t been a regular, but it was enough to make me feel jealous, forever reading the quotes and pictures of people (good people!) and wishing that one literary agent would take an interest in me. It is a false notion that any online “community” will offer me what I need when what I want deep down is to be satisfied with what I’ve already got. I’ve freed up an hour a day just by deleting the app off my phone.
It’s funny, because we are all the same. Me, you. Just little bitty people who think we could possibly find satisfaction in something under the sun, forever fooling ourselves into thinking we aren’t addicts of one thing or another.
I’ve been teaching little kids for years now, and I keep coming back to the sermon on the mount where Jesus said we are to be salt and light. We are to live lives that make others thirsty to know Jesus, and we are to be little beacons that point in His direction. But other people will never see the need for the salt shaker or the flashlight if we are all addicted to bumping around in the dark, content with our made-up lives.
I’ve found that the one thing that makes me walk away from social media is the fact that it never fully satisfies. I leave, still thirsty. Only Jesus can quench it.
And this is what I’ve come to realize about the book-writing dream, the one I sort of bashedly half-confessed to Tim Challies: it has to die. Not that the writing isn’t important, but because the finding myself within the publishing process will never be realized. Just like Instagram–it must become dead to me. We’ve got to cut ourselves free of the things that trip us up from running the race, the one where Jesus is ultimately glorified, and not ourselves.
Hashtag, killyourdreams, folks.
Please keep reminding me, too.
