For two weeks, I dropped out of my cyber-circle of friends and read no blogs, wrote no posts and didn’t surf the Net.

It was glorious.

While at first, I missed the contact. I grew to love the time it freed up for me. Not that I am usually on the computer for a great amount of time each day. It really was less than an hour or so total. It was just the brain space it took up processing all of the info flying at me:

“So-and-so is blogging about this. So-and-so is posting about that. Look what the _______ family is doing this week. See what is on sale at my favorite sites this week. Oh, and look at the news points…..divorce, custody, controversy.”

It was enough to clog my brain, grinding it to a screeching halt.

You see, I have learned that my mommy brain was only meant to absorb so much. I need to drink deep of the ways of the Lord. That means saturating myself with the Word of God. I need to take into account my family’s needs. I must keep up with my extended family, work on my writing and speaking. Clean my house; get my groceries; feed my clan.

I need to live my life.

Now, I am NOT totally knocking the Internet. It can be a valuable tool in accomplishing the above tasks. I love Bible Gateway to help me study the Bible. I get spiritual encouragement from several blogs like our President Lysa TerKeurst at Proverbs 31 and Beth Moore’s Living Proof Ministry. I get great ideas for homemaking from my fellow P31 speaker Marybeth Whalen and at The Urban Homemaker  website. And there is nothing wrong with reading these resources.

And by all means, I have a blog!!! My little fasting experiment has taught me to be even more intentional in making my blog point others to God, not to me. And I want it to offer encouragement, ideas and resources to help women live their lives and love God. Oh, and those of you who have been around awhile know I also like to give away freebies.

I also know using Facebook and the like as a resource to stay connected with far away family and friends is a great idea. And using it to know what to add to our prayer list is and even better one. I will continue that practice.

I have discovered that it all comes down to boundaries. Within reason, reading blogs and surfing the next can be helpful.I intend on still doing it at times. Without parameters, however, it can be detrimental to our lives. In a couple ways–

It can suck our time away; time we should be using to live and serve.

And it can make us discontent, as I spoke of in my last blog post.

But worst of all, it can breed deep within us a sort of soap-opera-like-yet-acceptable-in-Christian-circles type of addiction.

You know, your feet hit the ground in the morning and you can’t wait to see what is happening in so-and-so’s life. So you hop on over to her blog and live her exciting life with her. 

Or you can’t get enough of a certain headline news story and its’ happenings. So you click, click, click your day away.

My eleven year old son Spencer made a profound comment the other day when he heard some of us discussing reality shows and blogs. He said, “How boring. Why sit around and watch other people live their lives on tv or read about their lives on the computer? That is stupid. I’d rather go have fun and live my own.”

I think I’ll let him have the final word.

Happy Living-Your-Life-And-Loving-It,