Social Media 06: What Was I Supposed To Be Doing Right Now? Transcript

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

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Emily Jensen: Even just yesterday, I was making dinner—or it was maybe two nights ago—I was making dinner and I went to go check my recipe, and I forgot to check my recipe and I started checking who knows what. Probably social media, probably Instagram. And then I was standing there at my counter—I don't know; 10, 15 minutes went by—and I couldn't remember what I was doing at my counter.

Laura Wifler: That's the thing. You don't even remember what you were supposed to be doing. Or I'll go in to check something that's legit necessary. I'm going to get XYZ, and I am derailed the moment I open my phone. I think that oftentimes I am opening my phone when I have these feelings of being overwhelmed. Or I know for me a big one is any time that I hit a time in work where I'm like, "Oh, I don't know what to write next." I hit writer's block or I hit this—just a hard thing to figure out in work. I find myself going over to social media as an escape, for sure.

Emily: Yes, 100%. In fact, I've been observing recently that I hit a wall in my day where—I can really resist social media for a long time, but especially in the evening, after we've gotten through dinner and it's time to make it to that stretch until bedtime—I can really start to check out. I just sit down on the couch, and I get my phone out. The kids are playing, they're off doing something, and I just want to be done. It's my way of dealing with my overwhelm, my exhaustion of the day.

I think what we know from science, psychology—of course we know this from Scripture—is that overwhelm is a real thing and that our brains and our bodies have defense mechanisms to deal with the stress and the anxiety and the hard things that we are feeling in life and in motherhood and those defense mechanisms kick in. One of the ways we can defend ourselves or check out is through social media.

Laura: Yes. It's important to maybe note here for people who are wired maybe a little more like me—I often don't consider myself overwhelmed. I feel like I have a higher capacity and can handle a decent amount of stress. But when I read how overwhelm can manifest as intense emotion, as anxiety, anger, irritability, thought processes that are unhelpful, like worry or doubt or helplessness—these things where I was like, "Oh, they are manifesting in a way."

Because I often think of overwhelm as like, "Oh…I can't process and handle it and I'm just going to shut down." Thinking about overwhelm as sometimes manifesting as speaking a harsh word or having a short temper or feeling feelings of doubt, I know for sure that I'm like, "Oh yes, I can put myself in that category."

Emily: As I was reading about it, I think there's a ton of major ways, but a couple of major buckets—if you want to think about it that way—that we deal with overwhelm. Some people shut down and they get overwhelmed, so they stop doing work.

Then there are people who get overwhelmed, and it actually puts them into overdrive with work—

Laura: —Yes! That's me, that’s me.

Emily: —and they get on this high of task, task, task, task, and they cannot stop. For some people, overwhelm makes you the Energizer Bunny and you can't shut off, and for other people, you can't turn on.

Laura: Okay. That's absolutely fascinating because I would have not said like, "Oh, I get overwhelmed by motherhood." I would have been like, "No, not really," but 100% I get psychotic.

Emily: Yes, it's how you cope with it. The interesting thing that connects to social media, as we've been thinking about this, is that overwhelm can send us to social media as a coping mechanism, which we've already talked about. This is, "Hey, motherhood is feeling like too much or motherhood plus all the other things that I'm responsible for in life makes me want to just go numb or feel distracted or try to take control and conquer everything." 

Or overwhelm can be increased by social media. This is like, "Hey, maybe our regular lives are"—I don't want to say manageable, because we all feel stretched, but, like, God is being gracious to give us the things we need to get through our regular life. But then as we are living this additional life on social media, we become overwhelmed by all the stimulus, all the issues, all the concerns that we're going to talk more about. 

Or overwhelm is something that we can put onto other people through social media, because we feel overwhelmed. We feel all these feelings. We want to see things change and grow and be validated and all the things we've talked about on other shows. So we go into social media, and we heap burdens and demands on other people. I think one way we see this is sometimes influencers or Christian ministries or just the average Joe put up a state of emergency about every single issue. We can put impossible standards onto other moms through social media, again, as a way to cope with our own stress or feelings of failure. I feel like overwhelm and social media just walk hand in hand.

Laura: Absolutely. Especially as you were talking about how it can create the feelings or burden of overwhelm by seeing all these amazing things other people are doing. Or, like you were saying, "Hey, we feel all worked up about something, so we're going to project that out through our social media channels." I think with both of those things, it reminds me of Paul's letter to the Thessalonians. Paul is writing to the church to encourage them and reassure them, "Hey, you need to go on working quietly."

What's the verse? 4:11: "Seek to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands." I think it's really interesting to think about what it doesn't say. It doesn't say, "Hey, go lead a flashy life." It doesn't say, "Hey, make sure that you let everybody know how you're feeling. Hey, make sure that you escape whenever you feel nervous about something. Make sure you hold other people accountable when they're online." It says, "Lead a quiet life, mind your own business, and work with your hands."

I don't think the social media work that we're doing with our thumbs is going to qualify as what Paul is talking about. I just feel conviction in that of saying, "Okay, what does it look like to lead a quiet life, to mind your business?" That's what we want to talk about today throughout the show: what does it mean to be faithful in our real lives while also holding the tension of having an online presence as well?

Emily: Absolutely. I think one thing that's interesting is a lot of us would say, "Faithfulness feels so complicated, though. I don't know what it looks like to be faithful. That's such an ambiguous word. It's very vague. I want to be a faithful mom, but what does that mean?" I really like this idea of just saying, "Hey, it doesn't have to be so complicated." At the end of the day, it's doing the work that is in front of us. It's keeping the main thing the main thing, looking at the responsibilities that God has laid in our path—literally. Wherever you're standing in your house today, or whatever, look in front of you and see what God has you to be faithful in. Perhaps we need to stop scrolling.

I think one of the things that we get hung up on with social media is paying attention to peripheral concerns. This is a real-life example. I was a messy room kind of gal—

Laura: —I'm not even surprised.

Emily: —when I was growing up.

Laura: —I'm not even surprised.

Emily: Actually, I ran across a picture. My parents were filing all of their pictures, and I ran across the picture of my room, and I was horrified. It was worse than I remember in my mind, because now I'm married to a—

Laura: —A minimalist.

Emily: —minimalist. Everything is clean and tidy. Anyways, it was horrible, and my parents would be like, "You've got to go clean up your room." I would get so overwhelmed by this task of cleaning up my room that I would just go into a corner and start going through a box of notes that my friend wrote me and reading the notes and refolding them.

Laura: Totally distracted.

Emily: Remember when you would fold a note?

Laura: Totally. Of course, I would totally be distracted.

Emily: Oh yes. We also lived this very—side note: Laura and I lived in the day of magazine collages.

Laura: Oh yes.

Emily: We lived at a time when, if you did not cut that picture out and keep it, you would never see it again. I had piles and piles of magazine collages and old magazines. Hours would go by, and my parents would come up, and I'm like, "Oh, I went through this stack of magazines," and it's like, "That's great, but you didn't attack the main problem, which was cleaning your room." By doing the peripheral work, essentially, I was avoiding the main thing. I think sometimes on social media— perhaps there is something meaningful that we're doing on social media, but likely it's peripheral to the things that we really need to be tackling.

Laura: I think that is such a good example, Emily, of—it layers on these additional areas that we start to feel like, "Hey, this is what it looks like to be a good mom. This is what it looks like to be faithful in my real life." Honestly, God's purposes for motherhood are fairly simple and it doesn't look cookie cutter, but at the heartbeat—because I think we're trying to look like that Instagram person—but at the heart, it is really quite simple what he's asking of us.

First and foremost, it's really just to love God above all, to remember that your kids are not your ultimate purpose, your social media presence is not your ultimate purpose—even being a wife is not the ultimate purpose. It's actually to love God and give him glory. From that—when that is the first order of our heart, then we are loving our kids well, and we're putting them in a proper place. We're loving our husbands well, and we're putting them in the proper place. We're taking care of our homes. And with that, we have the Great Commission that we know says, "Go and make disciples."

We love God and then we love others, and, with that, we are simply showing an overflow of God's work in our own life to those around us. We're not necessarily making these perfect decisions or looking like this other mom or trying to emulate what culture tells us to be, but we are simply walking out the love that we've been shown. And that will look very, very different depending on where you live, how many children you have, what your marital status is.

I think when we are on socials, we're thinking, "Well, I need to look like her. I need to emulate her. That's what faithfulness looks like." Like Emily is saying—she was saying, "What's in front of you? What's in front of you right now?" I heard this example about these Navy Seals who—no matter where they were and whatever room that they're in—they would scan the room and look around and they would take control because it was in them. It was almost bred into them. I think about that in my own home life of looking around in the home that I've been given, the yard that I have, the children that are running around, and saying, "Okay, what needs to be done next?" Scan the room, find the need, and meet the need, and that is being faithful. Yes, that's as simple as it gets.

Emily: We cracked the code! [Laughter] I'm just curious—do you feel like your time on social media helps you do that? Navy Seal your life? Or does it detract—and I know it's more complicated than does it help or does it detract, but how would you describe it?

Laura: I would say, in general, if I'm really being ruthless, no. I think that we've talked about some of the redeeming qualities of social media before on past shows, where there can be types of Titus 2 experiences, or there can be life hacks that genuinely help your life. I can think of a lot of things where I'm like, "Oh, I found out about that on social and my life is a little bit easier because of that." In general, in order to be faithful—if we're just drilling it down—I feel like being online—I would be hard pressed to say, "Yes, social media helps me be faithful."

Emily: It's not essential, I think.

Laura: It's not essential.

Emily: You and I both know lots of moms in real life. In fact, if I were to take stock of just my circle of people that overlaps with your circle of people a lot, I think, "Well, who are some moms that I would list, as I just really see them being faithful to take care of the things that God has given them?" Most of them are not on social media at all, or they are very little on social media and it doesn't play a very big part of their daily life. That is not at all to be prescriptive and say, "Okay, now in order to be faithful, you have to get offline."

We're not trying to make a rule the other direction because obviously both Laura and I have online presences. We run a ministry online, but I think that's some food for thought of, "Hey, guess what? I know a ton of really faithful moms who just don't spend that much time on social media and it's not hindering them."

Laura: I think that's a really, really good point. I think that social media can affect two main areas of our faithfulness: our time and our energy. Let's dive into time maybe first because, just like we started out talking on the show, it is unbelievable probably the amount of time all of us spend on social. I know we've all heard about the studies and the realities that we think we're only spending five minutes and then you start taking a look at your tracker and suddenly you've actually spent three hours. Or people said, "I'm only going to spend one hour." They're like, "Man, that comes so fast every single time."

I think, for me, it has been a big conviction for—what does that look like in front of my kids? How is that time being taken away from them or from other important things where I'm Navy Sealing my life? When I start to really think and admit, "Oh, I am giving 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there, 40 minutes there," there is a lot of other good that can be done in my life. I remember—I read a lot of books, and a lot of people will ask, "How do you have time to read all those books?" A lot of people online will ask me, even. I've just said, "Well, I don't really watch TV."

It's a really simple equation. No TV—you can read more books. I also think that plays in line with social media. We often think, "Well, how does she have time to be so faithful in her life?" Or, "How does she have time to be so involved?" I wonder, if we started taking out some of the social media time, how suddenly, magically appears time to read our Bibles and to join Bible study and to Vox that friend something encouraging? How much brain space goes to social media that we don't even realize, and how much time goes to that, that we would get back? Probably hours in our days.

Emily: Oh, it's so true. I love this quote from John Piper that was recently—I feel like it was revived and spread across social media. I think he tweeted this in 2009. "One of the greatest uses of Twitter and Facebook will be to prove, at the last day, that prayerlessness was not from lack of time." Whoa. I think he's just communicating what we're trying to say here—that all of us like to complain as moms, "I don't have enough time to make the meal, or I don't have enough time to do this thing that I really want to do, or I don’t have time to read my Bible." Certainly, we don't have to match "For every minute that I spend online, I need to spend an equal and double minute in my Bible"—maybe you do.

But I think the principle holds that Psalm 92 teaches to number our days. Our life is short; we only have a certain number of time. Let's make sure we're using it wisely. Proverbs 27:1: "You do not know what a day will bring." We don't know what tomorrow's going to look like. We don't know what's coming for our lives. Let's steward the time we have now and really ask, "Is my time spent on social media a good investment in the kingdom of God? Is this investing in the things that I really want to be working towards?" Maybe it is.

Laura: We think it definitely can be. I want to reiterate that—we're online.

Emily: We're picking on it, but I think—ask the question.

Laura: —It's probably better to err on the side of caution. I think another important point that helped me when evaluating my social media behavior was also realizing how social media affects my time offline. Again, I know we're talking about science in all of this stuff, but it has proven the fact that social media and just the nature of our whole culture nowadays—our attention spans have gotten so much shorter, and it makes it hard to do that deeper work or work that requires a lot of concentration.

Even if you're a stay-at-home mom and you have no outside, income-producing work, it can affect things like paying your bills or having to make a lot of phone calls and appointments. I know, for me, I especially do see it in my work when I need to write an article or anything like that. I feel like it was good for me to evaluate social media's role because it doesn't just affect me when my nose is buried in my phone, but it is also affecting the way that I'm able to engage—even pretend play with my kids or just focusing and concentrating in on one specific topic. I think that was also just a convicting way to say, "Maybe I want to make some changes."

Emily: Totally. I heard this study—they measure kids' attention span changes with screen use particularly. I don't know if this was social media specific, but they said at 30 minutes a day, they started to notice a marked difference in a child's ability to attend to any other task and stay focused and keep ideas organized. They were projecting that out onto adults and saying, "Hey, maybe an hour to an hour and a half of time on a screen, especially when you're scrolling, clicking, scrolling, clicking, scrolling, clicking"—not just like, "Hey, my computer laptop is open," but I'm actually putting all these different stimuli in my brain—it's probably about the max that we can handle before it is probably changing our brain wiring and our ability, to your point, to manage all of our time, not just the time that we're on social media.

Laura: Yes. The next area relating to that is our energy. I will get online and suddenly realize, "Oh, I had no idea that was happening in the world. Oh, I had no idea this was a cause I needed to care about. Oh, I had no idea that these are the changes that I need to make in my life." I genuinely want to make those changes or care about that thing because whatever post I read is so convicting or so convincing. But yet, what happens is suddenly we're so focused on all of the evils and horrible things way out there online—sometimes millions of miles away—that we forget there are things in our own backyard that we need to be caring about.

Jennie Allen—she shared this post on Instagram, and she just talked about how "We're not meant to carry the problems of the whole world all day every day. We are the first generation to know them all. Let me be clear—I'm not saying we put our heads in the sand and get a pass." Then she goes on and says that we're experiencing "compassion fatigue," and that "Neighbors suffering are falling to the wayside for global crises. And we end up paralyzed."

I think that's exactly what I'm trying to portray here: just this idea that, suddenly, because I'm so caught up in what I need to do, do, do, do, do—I need to do the drives, I need to send the money, I need to have these conversations, I need to care about these crises overseas. I think those are good things. I'm not saying don't do those, but I also think we have to step back and say, "Because so much of my energy is going towards things that I found out about on social media, what am I missing within my own backyard and what needs am I not meeting?" Those typically aren't virally shared on social media, and so you're not seeing them over and over again.

How can we ask, like the Mother Teresa quote, "If you want to change the world, go home and love your family?" To hear from Mother Teresa—that's convicting. That's something that—for most of us, we will lead a smaller life that makes an impact on a small community that's actually around us. 

Think about even great missionaries. I was thinking about this the other day—people who you would say, "Wow, that person—look at their legacy, look at their story?" But who were they impacting in the moment? A small group of real people that they could touch and see and hug and cry with and laugh with. Yet they made an impact in that moment, just with those people, and their life didn't become necessarily this big legacy until later when someone wrote about it. I feel like we often, though, prop that up, saying, "They made this—I need to make an impact like them," but they did that just by being faithful where God had placed them. They weren't looking for these big, other, flashy things.

Emily: Oh, look at Jesus. He's the most famous person of all time.

Laura: Amen.

Emily: He came and primarily invested in a small group of twelve men who were not even that impressive or socially amazing people. I think if we'd say—if this way was good enough for our Lord and our Savior and our example that we follow, to invest small and see that seed multiplied into great fruit, then we don't have to be discontent with the small. We can say, "Yes, I'm going to invest in the people who are around me. I'm going to view that as a seed planted for God to grow and multiply into a great fruit." I think another gospel principle to keep in mind here is our human limitation. We are limited. We are not God.

We cannot know all things at all times or be all things for all people or have all power, all resources. I know I've heard it said before that each of us has a limited capacity. Think of all of us like we're different size jars. Some people are like a giant cooler and some people are like a little mason jar depending on our life circumstances, what kind of emotional things we're facing, how much stress we're under. You poke a hole in that and let that drain out—we're all going to have a different capacity. Well, the reality for me is that social media drains that for me.

I know that when I go online and I read about all these different things and I see these different things, I take them into my brain and I take them into my heart and I mull them over and I worry about them and I analyze them and I process them. I talk to Laura about them. [Laughter]

I just mull them over, and I've drained how much of my little jar, or whatever, just on that. Then, later in the day, when my husband needs something or my kids are having a conflict, I'm like, "I'm done. I'm already emotionally spent today." I didn't spend it on the right things. Even Jesus in his ministry—we see he didn't heal everyone. He didn't respond every single time he was called. We see him just using wisdom in the way that he spent his time and ministered to people, and that has got to be true for us too.

Laura: And, Em, going back to your capacity jar, doesn't it look like everybody online has a giant cooler? We think, "Wow, she's really doing it all," based on their presence on social media.

Emily: We know that people are changing that.

Laura: Yes. They’re trying to talk about it more?

Emily: Yes, yes, yes. That's what I mean.

Laura: People are trying to admit, "I don't do this," or "I don't do that," or "Here are my boundaries," but I still think we hop online and we're like, "Wow, she's just so high capacity. I need to be like that." Again, where we start to impose what these people look like online and we think, "Well, this is what I need to look like to be faithful in my life." The reality is we are seeing a curated version of their life, and it doesn't matter how small of a jar you have in real life—it probably looks really amazing online. It probably looks like, "Wow, she can really do it all."

Emily: You don't know what that woman feels like on the other side, who is responding to all of her comments and responding to all of her DMs and sharing all these bits of her day. Laura and I have even talked about that with stories. You and I have tried to create stories. Sometimes, we're like, "I spent so long on that. I'm so exhausted," and it created 30 seconds of content.

Laura: You will literally work for an hour and get something that somebody will crush through in three minutes. It's tough to find the ROI on that. Anyway, that's a whole 'nother conversation.

Emily: The point is that, as we are looking at other moms and saying, "Well, it doesn't affect her energy," or "Look, she's still taking care of her family and she's creating all this stuff," you don't know what she feels like, and you don't know what life is like behind those stories. It may be okay, but it may be that she's totally exhausted and feels trapped by it.

Laura: At the end of the day, I think the big question that we want all of you guys to ask is: if you do not take care of what's before you, who will? Who is going to sing hymns to your children? Who is going to pray for them? Who is going to answer those crazy questions that they have on the way to school or the questions about salvation that they have before bed? These are roles that only us as mothers can fulfill for our kids. Again, it doesn't mean social media doesn't have a place in our lives, but are these the needs that we're seeing first and foremost and that we're meeting, or are these the places that we're putting our best energy and we're putting most of our effort?

Somebody online—there are other people who can fill needs. There are other people who can care for stuff, but no one else can raise your child.

Emily: Amen. Just as another word of encouragement, believers have been able to be faithful in their circumstances for 2,000+ years without the internet and without knowing all the ins and outs. In fact, we were created to live in pretty small and specific communities. I was just thinking—it used to probably be that you maybe knew people in your family, a few neighbors, a few people in your town in terms of like, what concerns are in front of me, what different types of motherhood are there. Now we have almost an infinite scope of ways of life and concerns and things to look at. Certainly again, there's redemptive quality in that.

We don't want to say that God doesn't use that, or he hasn't moved the needle in that way. I know a lot of you guys have come to even know the gospel through Risen Motherhood and running across that on your feed, so he can absolutely use it. But believers have been faithful and have been able to spread the gospel without that for millennia. We don't have to be on social media in order to do what God is asking us to do. I think it's just a good reminder. We don't have to overcomplicate things. We just need the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We need a humble heart. We need the Word of God. We need the local church community to look around us and say, "What's in front of me right now and what does God have for me to do next?" It's probably something small. Sorry.

Laura: Something ordinary, not flashy and cool.