Delight Retreat 2018 Recap & A Social Media Revelation

A week ago today, I was decorating the Leavenworth Lodge for 20+ girls flying in from around the country to spend a few days together. It’s hard to describe what exactly the Delight Retreat is in just a few words in a blog post. You make a couple dozen new best friends. You laugh together. You cry together as you work through things you’ve never shared openly with anyone before. You sing at the top of your lungs worshipping God together, palms up and hands held high because everyone around you is doing the same and you’ve never felt so loved.

Laugh, cry, worship, repeat.

It’s honestly one of the most cleansing, healing, and peaceful experiences I’ve ever had. It’s truthfully really hard to describe online how amazing the retreat was… and I was a leader this time, not an attendee! Even in that role, God met me and showed me some parts of my life that need to be re-evaluated. Some patterns of behavior that wouldn’t necessarily be easy to stop or change but would bring me so much more life. Quietness. Simplicity.

There was something I heard a few months ago about eternal life that stuck with me. The speaker said, “Eternal life doesn’t begin after death… eternal life starts now.” I had never thought about it that way, but doesn’t it make sense? That’s why the Gospel is so freeing. Someone who has never experienced that freedom and joy can’t possibly know what they’re missing. But someone who has knows that the new life they live after committing their life to Christ is one that feels wildly different from the past. There’s so much peace and joy every day and so much hope.

This past weekend, I saw girls give their lives to Jesus that had walked through situations I can’t even fathom. Yet there they were, raising their hands, just wanting more of the promise that a life with Christ holds. No longer needing to carry their burdens. No longer having to worry. Choosing to believe that there is a Creator that loves them so much, that no longer wants to be separated from them…  that hope is so alive. I don’t know how else to describe the beauty of what the Holy Spirit has done!

I used to think if you had doubts, you couldn’t experience this love and peace and new life. If you thought, well, maybe that isn’t real… you were no longer “in.” How far from the truth that is. Walking with God looks like making a daily choice to live as if you know it to be true. That’s what faith is. Saying, “I can’t prove this to anyone… and I see signs, though I can’t capture the evidence… but I believe in the hope that this promise has for me. The future hope that this story holds. I want that. I want Jesus.” 

There’s beauty there, in the person’s heart that sees the hope and restoration that comes with a life committed to daily communication with God. How could there not be? The Gospel is so beautiful. Jesus consistently said he didn’t come for those who follow all the rules. He came for those who need him most. The crippled, the poor, the widows, the prostitutes, the sick children. If anyone were to model their life after his, the world would be a better place because of it.

I saw such beautiful, life-giving community last week with girls hugging each other, crying into shoulders, rubbing each other’s backs as they shared the darkest parts of their lives… the moments they wish had never happened. The feelings they didn’t know what to do with. The response was love. Physical, emotional, and spiritual love as they lifted one another up in prayer, forgiveness, and speaking truth over their lives and not feeding into the fear or the shame or the anxieties. How different our world would be if this community existed everywhere.

So… after experiencing community at its best and most life-giving for five days… I realized I hadn’t spent as much time as normal on my phone. That’s probably because most of the time spent on my phone is spent on social media. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter… sometimes I scroll and don’t even realize what I’m doing… it’s a passive activity. And if there’s one thing I learned this weekend, it’s that the Gospel is anything but passive. The Gospel demands activity and calls for proactivity. Once you’re living in the light and hope that its good news gives, it changes everything about you. It requires that of you by nature. We’re only here for a short time, and so many people live their lives in darkness and without hope. So we can’t help but share how we’ve been changed for the better and how we want nothing more than for everyone to have this same hope, too.

Yet the question on my heart this past weekend was, “Are you the same person online as you are off?”

I’ve loved sharing about Jesus on my social media platforms… I can’t help but share how awesome God is sometimes because I see him so clearly moving in my life! But have I defaulted to using that as my mission field and not my every day real life? When was the last time I had prayed before a meal, or talked to a friend about all the things God was doing in my life? When I only ever use a virtual platform to get those stories across… I think I’m doing a disservice to not only myself but my friends.

Spirituality aside, we live in a bizarre world when you no longer really need to ask a friend how they’ve been because you can see exactly what they’ve been up to by browsing their Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, or Snapchat.  Depending on which platform you choose, you can make conclusions about their professional life, their social life, their family life, their spiritual life, and even their mental health. Is that just a little weird or is it just me?

Last week for the first time in a long time, I experienced the beauty of getting to know someone outside of those social media platforms again. I wasn’t thinking of what I’d put on my story or how I’d edit the photo we were taking… and if I thought to take a photo, it was because I really wanted a photo with them, not because I wanted to share it somewhere. Most of the girls didn’t have a clue I was a wedding photographer and it was SO GOOD (this makes me want to cry) to be known outside of that identity for the first time in the better half of a decade. So good.

Several times during the retreat I found myself itching for the “likes” high. If you’ve ever gone a few days without posting anything new (anything – no photos, stories, posts, updates, etc.), you’ll find that your hand physically reaches for your phone and your fingers move to the app’s colorful little square and you have this anticipation that accompanies that itch. You want the high. But if you haven’t posted anything new, there’s nothing to get high off of. Just a bunch of other people getting their own highs. And you realize then how boring and two dimensional it all suddenly seems. When you’re sober, you can finally think with a clear head… and see with less cloudy vision how fulfilling the life right in front of you really is.

I say this for the people who have a social media platform driven by the desire for profit and success. We’re the most susceptible. We “can’t just quit!” because our business would come to an end… right?

After the retreat last weekend and just the few days at home not having to update my stories, scroll my feed, or worry about the app even being on my phone for my fingers to reach for when I need a quick distraction… it feels really good. I can climb into bed without bringing the world and its worries in with me. I can wake up without being reminded of all of the things I’m not doing. It’s just so much more quiet. There’s a peace (and productivity) to a life without social media that I’m not sure can be found with it.

I’m not sure where I go from here, but I do know that whatever God is doing in my heart this week, it is probably long overdue. My last social media fast was a year ago and I was going through the same wonderful feelings, then dove right back into the mindless, passive, habitual scrolling. It is such a waste of time and deep down we all know it. I do have a business that includes social media marketing/branding as one of its core marketing strategies, but God isn’t asking me to think six steps ahead here. He’s just asking me to listen and be here right now. Really here, though… not just half here, half gone with one foot in the real world and one foot in the virtual reality we hold in not just our hands but in our hearts and heads as well. I don’t want to miss real life anymore or feel guilty for being on my phone or waste literally hours in a day scrolling on social media apps… I want to live MY life, not someone else’s!

So if you’ve noticed a little more inactivity than normal, or if you wonder where I might be, I’m here living and working and loving my husband and family and friends all the same (but honestly probably more because I’m actually fully here in the present). I’m already seeing the fruits of that in how I look at Justin and how fun dinner or a long car ride is with him without having the rest of the world in the car with me. There’s just really something here that I can’t put my finger on exactly, so I’m not sure what my social media use looks like moving forward, but if I get to be this happy, content, and at peace without it, the habitual scrolling probably shouldn’t come back.

I had a friend once tell me they used to have 42,000 Instagram followers (and this was back in the DAY when only celebrities had that kinda follower count) and even though they were one of the few verified profiles followed by Instagram itself, they walked away from it all solely because it felt like it was infiltrating their thoughts and decisions. “I started going places just to put it on Instagram…” I think if we’re all honest with ourselves, we probably do that more often than we realize… without the temptation, I’ve already caught myself saying, “Wait… I don’t actually really want to do that… it just would have looked cool on my feed or on my story.” Maybe you don’t even realize what you might be doing for those reasons… you probably wouldn’t know until it was gone and you found yourself making your every day decisions without the admiration of the public eye. I’m telling you, it’s nothing short of life changing if you’ve been living in a social media heavy world (or industry) for quite some time.

Is it worth the extra income I might gain from being more “engaged” on social media? Or will my business actually be better off investing my time and energy in the actual WORK and not just the sharing of that work/following the work of others? Whatever the answer turns out to be for this season of my life, I’m SO grateful for the questions this year’s Delight Retreat brought to light in my heart. This is just one of them! I can’t wait to hopefully share more soon about our sweet time together in Leavenworth. As I send off the rest of these photos to the retreat coordinators, I’m imagining all the smiles they’ll bring to the attendees’ hearts as they share them with family and friends and hold them close as they cherish all of the memories they made. Last week was truly a glimpse of heaven and if I can hold on to that for just a little bit longer, I’ll be all the better for it.