Review: The 40-Day Social Media Fast

The 40-Day Social Media Fast book cover on blue background

I really wasn't expecting to do this fast concurrently with The 40-Day Sugar Fast, but I'm very grateful that I was challenged to do The 40-Day Social Media Fast during this past Lent as well as I found both to be helpful in focusing my time and attention on God.

Book Synopsis

Are you addicted to your phone? Do you find yourself engaging online but unengaged at home with the people right in front of you? Do you spend hours scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, newsfeeds, and YouTube videos? Have your devices become divisive--dividing you from family and friends and, most importantly, God? What would happen if you took some time to fast from social media in order to get social with God and others once more?

In the pattern of her popular 40-Day Sugar Fast, Wendy Speake offers you The 40-Day Social Media Fast. This "screen sabbatical" is designed to help you become fully conscious of your dependence on social media so you can purposefully unplug from screens and plug into real life with the help of a very real God. Take a break from everyone and everything you follow online. Disconnect in order to reconnect with the only One who said "follow me."

Source: Amazon

Book Thoughts

I'll be honest in that I had no idea how much time I was spending on social media until I started getting wellness alerts on my phone. As a result, this book came at just the right time. More than simply focusing on the amount of time we spend online, I appreciate that this book also delved into topics regarding our attention, the impact of comparison on our mental and spiritual health, and our self-worth. This is a book and a fast that I would repeat again based on the powerful reminders of living life offline. It's shocking that though I left social media for almost a decade and only returned to it to share book reviews that it has started to shape my behaviour and thinking. I'm grateful that this devotional book acted as an antidote to that for the 40 days I was engaged in reading it.

Since this book seems to complement The 40-Day Sugar Fast, readers will see parallels between the content of the books where the sugar fast book does recommend cutting out social media and the social media book recommends cutting out sugar or other possible idols in our lives. I can see how these books reinforce how anything can tempt us away from being fully devoted to God. My prayer is that I can heed the lessons learnt in this book and continually apply the messages of God's acceptance and love as a way to combat the messages I see online.

Book Summary

Format of book: 🎧
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Recommendation: 👍

Comments

Story Follow-Up

It seems that I opened up a can of worms with a story I shared yesterday regarding how I felt inundated by stories and posts featuring LDS authors on Christian Bookstagram. Since it's difficult to share on stories (IG has been quite glitchy for me recently), I'll share more here for context. Please don't read this if the topic isn't of interest to you or if you don't care too much about the theological background of the authors you're reading; that's absolutely fine with me if you don't read on 😀 Let me start off by saying that it's hard to convey things in a one-page story. I prayed that I would choose the words that would matter to summarize my thoughts, while acknowledging that they are imperfect and incomplete. If you met me in real life, you'd know that I'm fairly unassuming, very soft-spoken, and reticent to stir up controversy. I can see why people feel a little bit more bold online. That being said, I wrote this with a heart of conce

About Me

I normally shy away from sharing too much about myself as I stopped being active on social media almost a decade ago. When I mentioned that I casually browsed Bookstagram, I had been doing it with an account that contained zero content and zero followers at the time. This is now (slowly!) changing as I become more active on this blog. Because I would like to maintain my anonymity as much as possible, my biographical information will be scant, although I am sure that aspects of my life will emerge the more I share. Just so there is some context, here are some details about me: I am Canadian. I feel the need to mention this first as most of the Christian reading community seems to be American, and there is not always the same access to information, book promotions, and even vendors for those of us up north (yes, there are many publishers that do not ship books or send advanced reader copies to Canadians, but I hope this will change). I am an avid reader. I have averaged over 100 or more

Christian vs. Clean

This is a theme that isn't new if you've been following some of my musings over the past several months. You could even say this is the natural progression of taking this line of thinking to its conclusion. In evaluating which books to read, the refrain of Christian vs. clean has become so ingrained in my thinking that it's practically been on repeat for me. To be honest, I've never really held a view on Christian vs. clean books until the end of last year. Most of my reading since becoming a Christian has been all over the place, where I believed that acquiring knowledge, almost any knowledge, was worth it for the sake of becoming more learned. Being a voracious reader meant that I would consume most anything—especially if it was free as I didn't have a lot of books growing up (my parents preferred to take me to the library on a weekly basis as I would have cost them too much in books 😂). However, God has definitely been impressing upon me the conviction that I ca