Why am I writing? This newsletter. This caption. This email. This book. If I think about it—or compare too much with the work of others—the whole thing can start to feel a little futile.
This felt especially true this past week as I watched Instagram’s algorithm changes exasperate many writers online. (If you are not on Instagram and are tired of hearing people who are whine about it, please scroll down to the ✨ to continue.) In summary: the head of the platform said in one of his updates that People want more video, and we must give the People what they want. And then thousands of people commented on that same update: We do not like this.
I feel for the Christian writers on the platform, in particular, who have spent years working its inherently dry ground, tilling the soil and seeing some tenuous fruit—only to find that an algorithm change can wash so much of that progress down the drain. I have been there, done that, with a previous account I owned that got hacked and disabled while I was off Instagram for a month (when my mom died). I didn’t have the energy to fight the machine at the time, so I started a new one and turned over a new internet leaf as a Christian writer.
Being relatively new to Christian Instagram, the upheaval of the last week has left me stutter-stepping about my place on this platform. Soon, I will need to market a book. And I genuinely want to put in the effort—psst, I kind of like marketing—but I am no longer sure that Instagram has the same return-on-investment that it used to. The platform has historically been one my favorite corners of the internet. Many 30- and 40-something moms feel this way. We started out sharing filtered photos of our pets, our meals, our cherubic children in those little innocent squares, making our lives feel a little more beautiful for the capturing. But it’s changed, and it’s changed us.
There is good ink being spilled on this subject right now. This TGC piece by Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra—who recently abandoned all social platforms despite her work as a journalist and author—is sobering and thought-provoking, as is the podcast version. The book she edited on the subject, Social Sanity in an Insta World, which I’m nearly finished reading, has been even more helpful for those of us who intend to stay and to use discernment about the tool.
“Discernment,” Melissa Kruger writes in her chapter of the book, “is not avoidance of the world; it’s the ability to go into the world and embrace the good while avoiding the bad.”
This, Kruger writes, takes knowing what to do and practicing it. Good habits help, too.
Things are shifting, and the shift is leaving many writers soul-searching for where to invest their marketing hours, their ministry hours and, in some ways, their hopes of reaching readers. How do you measure success when the metrics are broken? How do you find readers when the communication lines feel like they’re being severed? How do you read or hope for others to read BOOKS when the channels we’re using are in the business of breeding smaller and shorter attention spans?
While these shifts shake themselves out, we have options. We can take breaks, zoom out, stare at the ceiling for a while. Getting off entirely can be a faithful option. Staying on with good accountability, good vision, good habits and rhythms and a strong sense of what you want to say and do can be, too. With a book in the works, I will likely need to choose the latter.
✨ All this leaves me returning to a thought that has been bumping around in my brain ever since I dared to send a book proposal to a publisher early this year. Why should I write a book about something that eventually happens to everyone—losing loved ones? What could my story possibly add to the piles of books that exist on similar subjects?
And then a friend reminded me of the gospels. Not the gospel but the gospels—as in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. If the story of Christ’s birth, life, death and resurrection is so clearly displayed in any one of these, why on earth do we need four versions of it?
Apparently, the story of God’s work in the world was too good, too riveting, too surprising, too personal to be kept to just one telling of it. Apparently, we need Mark’s incessant use of the word “immediately” to draw us into story after story as much as we need John’s beautiful, Genesis-like opening.
What if Matthew hadn’t spelled out the genealogies for us? What if Luke had said, “You know, being a physician is hard work; I don’t have time to write down my experience.”?
What if God isn’t nearly as concerned about there being too many tellings of the story as he is about there not being enough? About the one person who bears his image in a unique way not being faithful to tell what they’ve witnessed, to steward their talents? What if Mary, meeting the resurrected Christ at the tomb, said “I have seen the Lord!” to herself and to no one else?
I am not trying to make a case that every person should write a story and share it with the world. I don’t actually think that. But I do think there are good works to which every person must be faithful. And I do think that the abundance of people and stories—the sheer number that overwhelms us and makes us feel small and insignificant—is actually meant to point, instead, to God’s generous abundance.
He isn’t stingy in doling out story or (His) glory. We don’t have to be, either.
We can keep our eyes fixed on the little plot of ground before us, the little tilling and sowing and pruning of today. And we can trust the Overseer of our souls—through whom and for whom all things were created—for the fruit.
p.s. I am often reading entirely too many books at once. Here are the ones at the top of my pile. I would love to hear what you’re reading these days.