For 40 days and 40 nights, Victoria and I decided to unchain ourselves from the bondage of various forms of social media. With the exception of Facebook-for academic reasons-we disconnected ourselves from some the most popular forms of social networking, such as: Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram.

Let me be honest with you, I have never felt so bored, sitting on the toilet seat, than I had during the first week of Lent. Completing the most simplest of tasks, like warming up some rice and stew (YUMMY), without having twitter to embark on, made the 3 minutes feel like 3 hours of silent prayer in a room full of Buddhist monks - awkwardly boring.
I was well aware of the difficulties I would ecounter during this fast. I mean, of course I wasn't tempted by Satan to turn rocks into bread like my good friend Jesus, but I knew that breaking out of a daily habit was not going to be easy.

Little did I know how much I would learn.

If you don't know me well, let me tell you a little bit about myself and my relationship with social media.
I'm the person that uses twitter everyday to complain about how much I dislike twitter and people on twitter. Ironic right?
When I'm not complaining about the monstrosities that occur within the proximity of Twitter, I'm trying my best to utilise the timeline to spread the word of God and bring light to areas of darkness.
I could go on and on about how bad social media is, when used recreation-ally, but I won't.(That's a whoooole-nother blog, my friends...)

Instead, I'll tell you a little about what it prevents you from doing. Or rather what it's been preventing me from doing.

My social fast revealed to me that there is life outside my cellular device. Meaning talking to the stranger next to me in church could actually be more productive than checking the trending topics on Twitter. I made more friends in church, uni and everywhere else during my 40 day fast than I did within my whole 1st semester at university.
Secondly, I found myself reading a vast lot more than recently. There's a book called "KillJoys" pioneered by John Pipers ministry "Desiring God ". My joy for sitting down consuming novels whole has diminished since the beginning of university. I used to feel like there was just not enough time. Which I now found out to be a LIE.
After this book, within the 40 days, I read a 2 trilogies and one 4-book series. For me, it was like summer all over again!
The amount of spare time I had was utterly phenomenal. It made me realise exactly how much time I was spending watching other people's boring, yet intriguing, lives on snapchat.

The most interesting thing for me was my grounding in the word of God. Finding time to read the Bible has always been a struggle, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. During this period, I found myself consistently dwelling in the word of God. Don't get me wrong, I didn't become Pastor-Evangelist-Deacon-Prophet-Elder Rupert within 40 days; but I did find a more consistent pattern in my studies. This was not because I simply "had more time". It was alot more than that.

I realised that in the past, everytime I'd say I'm going to read my Bible, I'd get distracted by something that's going on online somewhere. Not only that, but often times if I'd read things on twitter that would anger me so much that I'd rather go to sleep than embark on the word of God.
Hear me out for a second though.

I don't blame social media for the my lack of disciplines in His word; but the absence of it has really revealed to me alot of things that has set a spark of change for the better.

I'd encourage you to try it sometime in your life.

You never know what you'd gain.

Happy Easter and Thanks for reading!

Rupert A.