God is online, and ready for your status updates

Don't just tell the world how you feel, share your life with the creator.

A day in the life of a student

Have you ever stopped to think about all of the different ways we communicate these days? Just think about the average weekday for a school student:

7:30am: Wake up, get dressed & then turn on Facebook to see what people have been up to & whether you’ve got any messages.

8am: You’re not sure if it’s week A, or week B at school, so you text a friend to find out, but end up calling them on their mobile, because you’re not sure if you’ve done your homework anyway.

1pm: The day’s going slowly, so in between classes you tweet about how bored you’re feeling.

3pm: Once you get home, it’s time to pop back onto Facebook to debrief, and then Skype a friend you haven’t seen in a while.

We can chat anywhere

In the 21^st century we find ourselves living in a world where we are contactable 24-7, 7 days a week! I knew this had gone too far when I was chatting to a friend on his mobile recently. When I heard a flush in the background, I realised he’d been chatting to me on the toilet!

Some might say that we’re forgetting how to talk face to face, but I think it’s quite the opposite. More than any generation before us, this generation knows the value of good communication! We’re good at sharing what our thoughts are, how we feel, what we’re getting up to. If some of the Tweets I have read are anything to go by, we’re perhaps too good at sharing!

But what about chatting with God?

When it comes to our prayer lives, I think a lot of us go back to a more old-fashioned way of communication. We think that praying to God has to be almost like a face-to-face conversation:

I have to sit down intentionally,
put my hands together in the “prayer position”,
make sure I’m using the right kind of language.

Is this how chatting with God has to be?

What if we allowed our conversations with God to have the same kind of dynamic life that our friends enjoy?

Sometimes it might just be giving Him a “status update”, “God, I’m really loving meat pies today.”
We might “text” God when little things come up we want to share (writing out a text on your phone that you save to drafts might even be a good way of recording how God answers your prayers over time).
And of course, sometimes we need to spend some quality 1-on-1 time with him too.

Paul tells us in 1 Thessalonians 5 “Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”

Sometimes our phones have no signal, and sometimes the internet is down, but we know that God is always “online” and keen to hear whatever we have to say.