I love thanksgiving, it’s a holiday that has it all. Great food, family, friends, football, sharing, giving, and thankfulness.
This thanksgiving I’m focused on the sharing thing. Giving what I have to others. I’ve been sharing blog posts every day since mid September (2019), sharing this much content has been surprisingly easy and is extremely helpful to me.
The older I get the more I want to be around people. In the past I didn’t care much about this. My personality is introvert meaning I feel energized by being alone.
But there are things in life that go beyond personalities.
Not sharing is toxic, healthy water flows. It takes two pieces of iron to sharpen a blade. “Iron sharpens iron”, each gives up some metal to make the blade sharp.
Sharing what you have is important. Consuming-only, causes disease and toxicity. If it’s social media consuming it is well documented to cause anxiety and depression.
Many only think of money when it comes to giving and sharing. But if we don’t have extra money we can still be givers and sharers.
Without money we can give our time.
Without money we can share humor and a laugh.
Without money we can share teachings.
Without money we can share insight and wisdom.
Without money we can share compliments and appreciation.
“But Peter said, “I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!”” – Acts 3:6 ESV
Social media, like all other things in life needs to be a two-way flow. We give out and we also consume. If we only consume and scroll all day, everyday it becomes a bad thing in our lives. A destructive force for anger, covetousness and even depression.
It becomes a thing that we should not pay the internet company to continue.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, we can make screen time a good thing by sharing often.
Jesus once said to his followers “let your light shine before others so that they might see your good works…”
Here are 3 personal rules I suggest for social media use to begin today.
1) For every two posts that you scroll/consume share a post of your own. This takes a lot of effort at first but it gets much easier. But it will make you more helpful and it will redirect your mind to creativity rather than to anxiety-provoking scrolling and comparing. If you can’t think of things to share then get off! Quit scrolling!
2) Find a niche that you can uniquely be helpful to others. Experiences you can share, insights, struggles you’ve overcome and share on that.
3) Expand your sharing and make your social media use a tool for your own channel or site or blog.
“Give and it will be given to you.” Take only and what you have may be taken from you. We were not made to only be consumers.