“Real Joy”

I’m starting to see vacation pictures pop up all over Facebook, which means people are taking vacations and posting pictures showing all the places they have been. I enjoy seeing the pictures because I believe vacations are a good way to unwind from the day-to-day stress of life and a good way to become re-energized for what lies ahead. Seeing these pictures also serves as a brochure of sorts for each place and helps me determine if I would ever want to go there.

But it’s still kind of an odd thing that I can see vacation pictures from people that I don’t hardly ever see in real life. In the past, before social media and cell phones, to see pictures like this you would have to know the person, see him on a regular basis, he would have had to take pictures and have the film developed, and then he would have to show you those pictures in person. All of this means that you would only see the vacation pictures of very few people and you would see possibly 25 pictures at most. Because of social media, we can now see hundreds of vacation pictures from all kinds of people we barely know as soon as they have time to post them.

And this can lead to people feeling bad about themselves and their lives because they haven’t been able to take a vacation…possibly in many years.

I’ve read that “comparison is the enemy of joy,” and I believe it. When we compare our normal, everyday lives to someone else’s highlight reel of fun things that they post on social media, it can cause us sadness and feelings of inferiority. Be careful about falling into this trap of the devil. We aren’t “less than” just because we don’t have fun things to post on Facebook. And it’s probable that the lives of others aren’t as great as they make it seem with a few pictures and several exclamation points on social media.

Instead, let us seek to derive our joy from our relationship with the Lord. Nothing anyone ever posts on social media can diminish that.

In His Service,

Matt Cannon

Director of Mission