Posting on the internet means nothing
but it does make me think
Tuesday night, I sat on my mustard yellow couch in the basement hunched over my computer and wrote 800 words of my 3,000 word seminary final. This book review, my last final in seminary, is an analysis of Disability and the Church by autistic pastor Lamar Hardwick. As tired as I am of school and assignments and as tempted as I am to simply get something on a page and call it done, I want to do justice to the book and the topic because it matters.1 People with disabilities are often excluded from our churches, not usually because of malice, but because of ignorance and complacency.
When I finished the second section of the paper, I read a few short pieces on the internet before heading to shower. Some of them were about Gaza: horrifying, sickening, unbearable things are happening. God, how do you hold the sorrow of the world? There are children being sacrificed for the egos of powerful men. God, when will you come and put us right? There is little I can do (some things are listed at the bottom of this article) besides feel the horror that the world holds.2
Growing up, I thought that to have the heart of God meant always being happy and seeing the best in every situation. I was never very good at that; my lack left me certain I was not a good follower of Jesus. Slowly I discovered that God contains a multitude of feelings about the world as well. God, too, is horrified by the violence that rips apart families and communities. The story of the flood started making more sense. Wouldn’t it be better to wash all of this away and start again? The countercultural way of Jesus gains more color, a vibrant option among bombed cities and death trap tent camps.
Being off Instagram has freed me from the compulsion of posting about news stories. I no longer need to signal that I care, that I don’t live in a self-absorbed, made-up world. People don’t send me dms asking why I haven’t commented on current events. Many stories capture my attention, break my heart, linger in my mind as I fall asleep. I cannot post about all of them. It would change nothing if I did. I do not believe that this post, this writing, makes me a better person than if I had left it on my computer unseen by anyone besides me and God.
And yet, as someone who has frequently found the world to be a terrible place even in my life as a middle-class American, there is comfort in knowing that this too reflects God. God is moved by our suffering. God holds out tears in bottles. The creator God came in the flesh to start putting the world back together, to recreate what was and is broken. He knows our suffering. Last week, I got on a Zoom call with my professor and recited Psalm 149 to him. Memorizing the psalm was a requirement that I did not expect and calls me to memorize more. I see the world and the news through the lens of this psalm now. The warning is clear: God will call the powerful to judgment for their use and misuse of their power.
To see the horror is not enough; in fact, seeing all the horror that we do paralyzes us. To see the horror and retreat into a shell is inadequate. Sharing in God’s life provokes me to respond the way God responds to brokenness: to move in closer. I cannot go to Gaza and cry with those mamas. And posting on the internet like this is worth almost nothing.3 But I can move in closer to my own community. I can live locally, the same way Jesus did when He was here in the flesh. As I weep over Gaza, I can also move in love toward the broken places around me where I can cry with people, and use what I have—no matter how small— to recreate the world. On earth as it is in heaven with whatever power I have as we wait for Jesus to return and make us new.
As time goes on, this matters less and less to me. Being done matters more and more.
It is not just Gaza, of course. A church partner came to our staff meeting a month ago and told us the situation in Ukraine is much worse than it has been. Thousands of pieces have been written about how we are not made to know the news of the entire world. It is too much for us. But here we are.
I made this statement twice on purpose. Posting on the internet does not actually do anything. It is easy to do this. It is hard to move in compassion toward my own community and give up some of my time and privacy and freedom.
Thank you for wrestling through this with us. I, too have been frustrated by the fact that all the online virtue signaling tempts me to wonder if my work and presence in my own community is worth it, when I know Scripture teaches that is actually the only thing that makes an eternal difference.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts authentically.