I recently read a great Facebook post by Jeff Turner, where he speaks about getting our priorities straight when besieged by so many social media pressures and bandwagons to jump on to.

My own personal motto is to do as I see Father doing (Jn 5:19) and if He’s not doing, then I’m not interested. This is the keynote ‘slogan’ of my blog, in fact. I learned some time ago how to prioritise things for the Kingdom’s action in my life, but it is refreshing to see the same principles being expounded by modern-day prophets like Jeff.

But anyway, over to Jeff:

“Anyone out there still worried about Joseph Kony? Anyone? No? Surely you remember him though, right? No? You mean, the African warlord that turned everyone on social media into an activist in 2012 doesn’t even register anymore?

“Huh. Who saw that coming?

“You see, social media has afforded us with a convenient way of feeling like empowered activists who are really doing some heavy, hard hitting work, but, alas, what it’s actually done is turned us into a school of halibut, who move instinctively wherever the crowd moves, but who are almost incapable of independent thought or passion. When we aren’t being fed a cause to be passionate about, we don’t have one. Fortunately for us, though, the internet doesn’t let a week go by where it does not introduce us to a new cause demanding our complete and total devotion. We change our profile picture, display our hashtag holiness for the world to see, and are then on about something else by Saturday night. This not only keeps us from ever actually devoting ourselves to something real, it also leaves the causes of the week, which may actually be legitimate, largely unaffected, since we have been trained to only become involved superficially.

“Friends, you cannot be truly devoted to every cause social media shoves in your direction, and you don’t need to feel bad about that. If you thinly spread yourself out over every need that exists in the world, none of them are getting your full attention, and so nothing is really being done. You can’t stop and weep over the corpse of every raccoon, opossum or armadillo you pass on the highway, or you’ll never get anywhere. You don’t have to be cold and indifferent to the suffering of roadkill, but you also can’t become so emotionally involved that you can’t drive a half mile without pulling your car over. You have to find *a thing, or maybe two, and give yourself to those things. That’s how you progress and make change. You have to be ok with other people not being ok with you not being a zealot for what they’re zealous about. You have to not allow yourself to be guilted into jumping on bandwagons you know you won’t stay on anyways, and you certainly should not be jumping on them for the attention it gets you.

“I discovered a long time ago that I have a message I’m passionate about, and that is what I need to keep on about. If I’m drawn away by every trending issue, I will lose the thing I actually care about. I can agree that your passion is good, and your cause noble, and I can even find ways of addressing those issues using my own medium and methods. I do not, however, have to become consumed and swallowed up by a collective calling for the head of Joseph Kony, the firing of a pizzeria manager for failing to be nice to a customer who then blogged about it, or whatever.

“You have to be passionate about what *you are passionate about! Don’t settle for the fake. And don’t just do what everyone else is doing, if you don’t feel it in your gut. Study the issue out and discover for yourself if you care about it. *Then, by all means, give it your everything.

“Just some random thoughts for this evening. Peace.”