[Gary Petty] Anxiety, part 3. In our last two BT Dailys, we’ve been talking about anxiety in this series. We talked about how to start every day by approaching God in prayer, Bible study, and meditation, before you do anything else. Let Him into your life, and that will guide the rest of the day. Our second point was, throughout the day, return to that morning experience. Take the scriptures that you’ve learned, take those thoughts, remember those thoughts, and take those moments all throughout the day to pray – to pray and return to what God has taught you during that morning time that you spent with Him.

This brings us to a third point, though. It’s something that’s part of our modern world. That’s social media. Social media isn’t evil, and it can be very good in our lives. But we have to be very careful. Psychology Today had an article about how they’re finding that many young people in their twenties and thirties and teenagers are suffering unusual amounts of anxiety, and some of it was because of social media. Getting so involved in what other people look like, what everybody else is doing, and feeling connected to other people, but in reality, they weren’t connected to anybody. You know, strangers who mark themselves as “friends”. The important thing in our lives – we were created by God to be real social beings. And that means to have real relationships. And real relationships can be connected sometimes through social media, but the real have that closeness, takes face to face time, human time, discussion, touch. We can see the person, you can hear the person. It is important that we disengage at times from social media and spend more time face to face, and at activities, talking, laughing, sharing life in a real sense, not an artificial sense – which social media does – but in a real sense with people who count most. You get tied up in all kinds of issues on social media that really don’t matter to your life.

So be very careful about social media, because they’re finding we can become addicted to the behavior. And when we become addicted to behavior, we have dysfunctional emotions. Face to face. God wants you to have meaningful relationships with Him every morning, and throughout the day – and then with family and friends and other people that bring real meaning to your life, but you also share and give them meaning, you give them love in their lives.

That’s BT Daily. Join us next time.