Thinking in Tweets – Inspired by Veneer

I notice that lately I have begun to think in tweets and facebook posts. My eyes are welling up with tears as I write this. I have no idea why this feels wrong, but it just feels so wrong and defeating. Since I was little I have always thought of my life as a movie with other people watching. Maybe that is because The Neverending Story was my first favorite movie that I watched over and over. The concept was presented to me as early as I can remember – that the character Atreyu was being watched and read by Bastian, and I was a character watching Bastian and Atreyu and somewhere someone else was watching me, Bastian and Atreyu. So maybe this warped my thinking a little bit. And maybe it helped me to do some things in a better way. Maybe it made me take more opportunities to be heroic in my life.

As I learned in Flyleaf, to have people always watching you as if you are on a stage, can totally warp your identity and way of thinking. Not everyone is always ready to be on a world-wide stage where what they do, say and think has the potential to be documented forever on the internet. I know for me this was the heaviest weight about being in Flyleaf. I knew people were watching, listening and learning from the smallest things about our lives.

There are things I remember about my Aunt growing up that are so small and insignificant to her, but to me they are as clear as day, because she was my hero. My heart was set on learning all I could about her and about how to be like her. I recognized this same heart in some of the people who watched us.

In seasons where my heart was in a terrible place and I couldn’t figure out left from right for my own self, the weight of others trying to tell right from left by watching my life almost crushed me to death. I had condemned celebrities in my heart for their carelessness in leading people. So now that I was carrying a platform, and falling into my own hell and all of the sudden had the potential of leading others to damnation with me. All the condemnation I had passed onto celebrities, was falling on my own head. I thought, “They need to be stripped of that platform that they are abusing” and when it was me I thought “I need to be stripped of my life that I am abusing.”

With fame, there also comes a weird paranoia that is rooted in a wise idea. The idea of being guarded is beautiful wisdom on so many levels. The idea of wearing different hats for different situations is important and keeps you sane. To be able to know the difference between someone who is: 1. talking to you because they care about you and your life and are genuinely interested in you, verses someone who is 2. talking to you only because they have something to gain or benefit from talking to you, verses 3. someone who you are leading, verses someone who is your family, verses 4. someone who is waiting for you to fail so they can crucify you. This is a great wisdom and there are different hats to wear in front of each person in order to guard yourself in a healthy way, but if you aren’t careful this can lead to crazy paranoia that you can never trust anyone ever. You can become so guarded and compartmentalized that you don’t know who you are anymore. It’s important not to lose the real you. It’s important to find out who the real you is and to love that person. That person is God’s great idea, His work of Art, His beloved masterpeice… that is you.

A lot of times we emphasize maximizing every great thing we think we have, using it for favor with people, to teach people, to market and make a name for ourselves, but I think this mentality can begin to squash the sacred, intimate, uniqueness of who we truly are. How can we know who we are when no one’s looking, if we are in the mindset that everyone is always looking?

Once I was laying in the grass in my backyard on a hot day in Texas. I was in the middle of the yard where I hardly ever stepped. As something tickled my hand I lifted it up to my face to find the most amazing iridescent, tiny bug. The colors on its body where phenomenal. He glowed with colors I had never seen before and the glory of God’s divine fingerprints were all over this creature. It occurred to me, (in that moment before twitter existed) that God had made something that would cause people to have a sense of awe over Him that no one would ever see. This tiny, living creature would probably live its whole life forging the terrain of my backyard and die here. It probably had family members that we just as phenomenal and no one would ever see them hidden somewhere in my backyard. Then I thought of the ocean and how amazing and unexplored it is. God makes things beautiful that no one will ever see and to him I don’t believe it is ever a waste.

It reminds me of what I heard Beth Moore say about Jesus when she was talking about how people were encouraging him to show His powers to everyone so they would worship Him and praise Him as God. She said, “What they didn’t understand was that Jesus’ goal was not to be a public figure, but to be a personal Savior” He wants relationship with us that is deep, genuine, abiding and sacred.

Like that moment I had with God in my backyard, marveling over the wonder of a bug.. a moment that wasn’t stolen by a snapshot, caption and posting, then being sucked into another world full of people’s A.D.D. chatter. I got to be still and spend that long sacred moment in wonder of our mysterious, loving, beautiful, artistic God.

I’ve noticed lately, that I have begun to experience beautiful moments through my camera lens, instead of with my naked eyes, for the sheer purpose of “blessing others” by putting the image or video on display for the world to ‘like’ and comment on. Something about me being present in the moment gets lost. I’m already in the future, scrolling down to see who saw it and what they will think. There is an eternal moment in the present that I miss when I do this, a connection to eternity, to heaven, to God, that we miss when we are staying in the future (or past) instead of being truly and fully present.

That’s why it makes me cry to think that I am thinking in tweets and facebook posts. I have come to a shallow purpose and short sighted end to revelations and magical moments that could otherwise be explored, marinated on and actually change me for the better. These are moments and revelations I could spend with my family being fully present and fully in love with them, or that I could spend with God riding to the boundaries of my understanding with him as I just sit still, think, imagine, learn, and grow.