Grappling with mental, emotional, and spiritual health issues

In Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a martial art most well known for specializing in ground grappling, the goal is to pin and control your opponent and then submit them with either a joint lock or a strangulation. John Danaher, who many consider the sport’s greatest coach, describes it as “The art of control that leads to submission.” Greg Souders, another prevalent voice in the sport, describes jiu-jitsu as “The game of immobilization as it leads to strangulation and breaking.” 

However one chooses to describe it, the general idea of jiu-jitsu is the same: take your opponent to the ground and, using superior angles, positioning, and leverage, make it difficult or impossible for them to escape. Then, isolate and attack their arm, leg, or neck, and apply sufficient force to either break said arm or leg or cut off the blood or oxygen supply through the neck until your opponent taps in submission. 

Of course, this is all easier said than done. Every advantage must be earned when dealing with a fully resisting opponent or training partner. The person you are trying to pin and submit is also trying to pin and submit you. It’s a constant struggle. It’s a battle of wills as much as it’s a battle of skill, pride, strategy, and athleticism. Everything in jiu-jitsu matters, and nothing in jiu-jitsu is easy. That’s one of the reasons it is such a rewarding practice to participate in. 

With this in mind, a shared joke in jiu-jitsu is to yell, “Just stand up!” When someone is pinned and struggling to escape, it’s simple advice but often quite difficult to act on, especially against a resisting opponent and the force of gravity working against you. For this reason, “Just stand up!” is often said with sarcasm and received with scorn or laughter, depending on the recipient’s mood. 

Much like “Just stand up!” in jiu-jitsu is absurd advice to give someone who is pinned under a resisting opponent, “Just get over it!” is ridiculous advice to give to a person suffering from grief, depression, anxiety, trauma, addiction, or some other psycho-emotional ailment. While it may seem like helpful advice from the onlooker’s perspective, it is often less than useless for the person struggling with whatever issues they are experiencing. These usually well-intentioned comments can even exacerbate the recipient’s mental, emotional, or spiritual health issues by diminishing their seriousness and making it seem as though it is merely a lack of effort that is preventing them from being overcome. 

Like jiu-jitsu, our mental, emotional, and spiritual health is complicated. Many forces are working against us as we try to persevere through this thing we call life. While those of us being pinned by another jiu-jitsu practitioner would love to “Just stand up!” and those of us grappling with mental, emotional, and spiritual health issues would love to “Just get over it!” there’s usually more to it than that. As hard as we are fighting, our opponent is also fighting back, and sometimes we are outmatched. 

Sometimes, our opponent is bigger, stronger, faster, or more skilled than us, and we cannot escape our difficulties alone. Sometimes, we need help. This is true in both jiu-jitsu and in life. No one ever became a jiu-jitsu world champion without a coach, or several coaches, and a variety of skilled training partners. If you are struggling with mental or emotional health issues, don’t assume you can do it alone, either. 

When I was at my absolute lowest in my addiction, I had to come to accept that I could not overcome my problem by myself. I needed help. My parents helped me get into rehab. The rehab facility helped me get into a halfway house. The halfway house helped get me in touch with people who could lead me out of addiction and into a spiritual experience that would solve my problem. It took the proverbial village to raise me from spiritual, emotional, and psychological death. 

Likewise, many years later, when I finally admitted that I was struggling with anxiety and depression, I didn’t simply “muscle my way out of it.” I couldn’t. I couldn’t “Just stand up!” and “Just get over it!” I couldn’t do it alone; once again, I needed help. I needed my wife’s support to work through my issues; I needed friends who had been through similar problems and who could recommend good therapists; I required the therapists themselves, and finally, but most importantly, I needed God to guide me through all of this as I found my way back to him. 

Whatever you are grappling with, whether it is another person or your demons, know that you are not the first to struggle with this issue; you won’t be the last person to do so, and you are not alone. Countless other people have had whatever problem you are having and are willing to help you. Don’t waste your time trying to “Just stand up!” or “Just get over it!” You can’t. I couldn’t. We can’t. 

We all need help, and we all need each other. I love you, and we love you. Please do not give up. You are truly not alone. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Acknowledge the hurt is real so that you can heal

The first step in healing is acknowledging that, in fact, we have been wronged. That the hurt is real. That a debt is owed. That we are in pain. That an injustice has been done. But this is only the first step. 

If we are to heal, we must then be willing, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, to free the person who wronged us from their debt for the sake of our own soul. For the sake of our own peace. For the sake of our own joy. For the sake of those we love and serve. 

We cannot do this alone. Only God can transform this pain, this very real and justified pain, into healing, but we must be willing to sacrifice our suffering, our pride, and our resentment, at the altar of His love. We must be willing to let go of this debt we are owed, to release it, to release our debtor into God’s hands. 

Justice will be done, but it is not ours to do. We will all pay the price for our part in things when we someday face Him. But for now, we are called to let our debtors go, to heal, and to move on with the help of God and community, and with the love that can transform all pain and all suffering into purpose. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

A perfectly imperfect reminder of our perfect imperfections

A couple of years ago, my mother gave my daughter a four-pack of friendship bracelets. My daughter gave me one of them and somehow lost the other three. They were supposed to all say, “Best Friend,” which is kind of strange if you think about it. Is it really possible to have four best friends? We are lucky to have four good friends, let alone best friends. But that’s not really the point. 

Anyway, all four bracelets were supposed to say, “Best Friend,” but I noticed that the one my daughter gave me actually said, “Bsst Friend.” It took me a while to notice it, but when I did, I asked her about it and whether it had special meaning. My assumption was that it was meant to be that way. 

She told me that it was supposed to say, “Best Friend” and that “Bsst Friend” was a mistake. I told her that I loved it anyway and, in fact, I liked it even more because it was unique. “I bet no one else has a Bsst Friend bracelet from their daughter,” I said. Her response took me completely by surprise. 

She said, “I guess your bracelet is just like us.” 

“What do you mean?” I asked. 

“Well, it’s imperfect, but it’s still beautiful, just like we are still beautiful even though we are imperfect” she replied. “Nothing is really perfect anyway. So your bracelet is kind of like a reminder of that. Right, daddy?” 

“Yes, dear,” I responded. “No one and nothing is perfect except for God and, even though we do the best we can, we will always fall short. But that’s okay because we are still beautiful and God loves us even in our imperfectness. Thank you for the bracelet, my dear. I’ll wear my Bsst Friend bracelet proudly to remind me of you and how much I love you.” 

“I love you, daddy,” she said with a big smile and gave me a hug. 

I still wear my Bsst Friend bracelet quite often. I sometimes get funny looks because it’s a rainbow bracelet and I am a pretty big, rather imposing looking guy with a bald head, a beard, and signs of cauliflower ear from years of jiu-jitsu, even though I’m actually just a big, gentle panda. I think a lot of people assume it has some hidden meaning, and I suppose it does. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Making time to love God and my fellows

Having a disciplined prayer life is essential if we want to establish and maintain a relationship with God. Prayer is the act of momentarily forgetting the world in order to put our mind on God. It is a decision to leave everything else behind so that, even if for a moment, we may seek union with our creator, to spend time with him, and to get to know him. 

While God is constantly reaching out for us whether we know it or not, it is up to us to reach back to make the connection. We cannot manufacture grace or salvation through effort, but we can develop a relationship with the source of grace and the giver of salvation. We have to do some of the work.

By setting aside time for God, we are telling him that he is important to us, that our relationship with him matters. This will mean that other things are going to have to wait. If our relationship with God is our priority, we must act like it. 

This is not easy to do. There are an infinite number of distractions in this life vying for us to choose them over God. When the world is not trying to get our attention, our own minds come up with things to worry about, to desire, or obsess over. It is as if we are wired for an inattention on God. 

This morning in prayer, for example, my daughter, my wife, and my phone were all trying to draw me away from God. None of it was malicious, except maybe the phone. I’m becoming ever more convinced that my phone and everything it represents it a tool of the devil, but I digress. 

My daughter and my wife were not even trying to get my attention. I do my best to take care of them and, in turn, they try to respect my prayer time. It’s just that I could hear them getting ready for school and work, respectively, and my mind started to wander away from God and toward what I could do to help them or to get involved with their interactions. 

They didn’t even need my help. I had already made breakfast for my daughter and her lunch was made the night before. She was fully dressed and everything was packed for school. My wife was simply doing her own thing and getting herself ready for work. Everything was fine, but my mind insisted upon engaging with them which meant not being open to receive God’s quiet presence. 

My own brain was trying to keep me away from God and my silent prayer. It wanted to do anything but sit still in God’s presence. It told me that, by sitting quietly in prayer I was being a bad father, a negligent husband, and that I was being selfish. Again, neither my daughter nor my wife actually needed me. 

I had already done my part for my family before sitting down to pray and they were perfectly fine in that moment without me, but my mind rebelled at the silence and rejected the idea that I could simply be still for a while and allow God to be God. But this was my prayer time. That means, before I even sat down, it was decided that all I was going to do for the next hour was to pray, read, and pray some more. 

This decision, made long before I even sat down, meant that, no matter what excuses and distractions my mind wanted to come up with, this was prayer time. This was as true today as it was the day before and as it was the day before that. Also, God willing and barring any emergencies or catastrophes, it will be equally true tomorrow. 

I am not a naturally disciplined person. That is why I have to have a dedicated time for prayer. If not, I will simply never get around to it, at least not with the attention and intention it deserves. For me, my prayer time has to be pre-established so that I have no excuses. In fact, I don’t even have to think about it. 

I don’t pray when and if I feel like it, although sometimes I do that also, but because it is time to pray. Because I made the decision once, I don’t have to make it again. I pray at prayer time. By being disciplined in this way, not only is my prayer life improved, but I have also found that the world can actually get along just fine without me for a while. 

Life doesn’t stop going simply because I am praying. The world keeps spinning and the clock continues to tick. What does happen, however, by having an established, disciplined prayer schedule, is that I slow down. 

By being disciplined about my time with God, by regularly practicing stillness in his presence, I am telling him that my relationship with him is important, that even if only for this one hour every day, I am able to love God with all of my heart, soul, and mind. This, in turn, makes me more loving toward my fellows. In the end, isn’t this the most important thing any of us can do, to love God and each other? Isn’t this worth our time? 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

A wave of gratitude washed over me

Some days I am struck speechless by how fortunate I am, not because of any one particular thing or any specific aspect of my life, but because of all of it. I am awe struck by how generous and gracious God has been and continues to be to me, in spite of the fact that I absolutely do not deserve it. 

The little bit of faith and faithfulness that I bring to my relationship with God has been repaid a hundred times over, especially when compared to all of my sin and selfishness. God is truly great. He is merciful, loving, and patient, and he keeps his promises. 

Tonight was just one of those nights when it hit me all at once just how amazing the life God has given me truly is and how grateful I am for it. My day was not particularly easy or even special. In fact, it was a pretty normal Wednesday for me. 

I woke up, made my daughter breakfast, and sat down for my prayer hour. I read some scripture, read a few chapters from some spiritual books that I’m in the middle of, sat in silent prayer for twenty minutes, and wrote my daily spiritual poem. After that, I had my weekly call with a friend for whom I’ve been a spiritual director for many years, and then I went to speak at a local club for people trying to recover from alcoholism. 

When I got home from my speaking commitment, I had lunch, sat down to check on my graduate school application, and listened to a talk on the Carmelite spirituality of St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. Then I took a brief nap before getting my daughter from the bus stop, having lunch with her and her mother, and getting us both ready for jiu-jitsu class. 

A couple of days a week, before teaching my adult class, I teach a small semi-private jiu-jitsu lesson to my daughter and several of her teammates. They are great kids who listen well, love to learn, and don’t mind working hard. Teaching them and watching them grow in both jiu-jitsu and life has become one of the most unexpected bright spots of my life. 

Everything tends to move pretty quickly from there. I teach the kids, then I teach the adults, and then I rush my daughter and I back home to shower, have dinner, and get ready for bed. Every week, on this particular night, as her mother puts her to sleep, I host a Zoom meeting for people who have had or are seeking a spiritual experience in order to overcome alcoholism. It was in this meeting that a wave of gratitude came washing over me. 

None of the things that happened in my life today, absolutely none of them, were things that I ever dreamed of or wished for in my previous life. If you would have told my younger self that this was what my Wednesday would be like as a forty-six year old, not only would I have not believed you, but I would have turned and run the other way. And yet here I am, completely awestruck by this amazing, full life I have today. 

I literally got to spend all day going deeper into my relationship with God and helping other people. What could better? What more could I possibly ask for? It’s as if God has given me a little glimpse of heaven right here in this life. I’m not sharing any of this to brag or boast. This is neither a point of pride nor vanity for me. 

I’m sharing this because I absolutely do not deserve it. I’m sharing it to give glory to God because, without him, none of this would be possible. Left to my own devices, not only would I not have this life and these amazing opportunities for service, but if I did have them, I wouldn’t appreciate them and I would most likely ruin them. 

This is me giving praise to the one who makes the broken whole, who gives sight to the blind, and who allows the lame to walk. God has given me so much and I have given him so little. All I have to offer him is my faith, my trust, and my service, but without him, I’d even mess that up. What an amazing God he is!

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Don’t yuck someone else’s yum

I once asked my wife how she learned to eat chicken feet, something I have never developed a taste for. She said, “When I was growing up, we had three generations living in our home and, in my country, the oldest people eat first and the youngest people eat last. If we had chicken for dinner, my grandmother took the pieces she wanted first, then my parents took the pieces they wanted, and the kids ate whatever was left. So we learned to eat every part of the chicken and, unlike here, we didn’t just buy chicken pieces. We bought and cooked the whole chicken. From the head to the feet with everything in between, nothing went to waste. I learned to eat everything because I had to. It’s all we had.” 

Hearing this was not only enlightening, but also humbling. It made me realize how easy I truly had it growing up. Not only did we generally get to eat food that we liked, albeit within reason, but we also had such an absurd surplus of food that we never really felt the burden of having to eat anything we didn’t like out of necessity or threat of going hungry. We could afford to be picky and, with junk foods, snack foods, and frozen foods abound, our cupboards reflected this fact. 

My wife, on the other hand, having grown up in post-genocide Cambodia, had way fewer options. Her family shopped, cooked, and ate, first and foremost, for survival. One chicken had to make multiple dishes, feed multiple generations, and had to last across multiple meals. They cooked and ate every part, perhaps grilling the legs and wings, making a stir-fry with the diced up breast meat, and making soup with the thighs, feet, neck, head, and the carcass. Even the organs and the blood were cooked and eaten. 

The more I thought about this, the more spoiled and insulated I began to feel. It wasn’t a sense of guilt or even shame, as I knew that I did not choose to grow up where I did, how I did, with the family I had, and the luxury to choose my food from day to day and meal to meal. We were each born into the worlds we were born into and we only knew what we knew. Rather, she helped me to understand just how little I knew about the world outside of my own culture and upbringing. 

Now, whenever I see someone eating something I don’t eat or wasn’t exposed to growing up, instead of judging or criticizing it, I take a moment to think about what my wife said when I asked her how she learned to eat chicken feet. Even though my mom encouraged us to try different things, I think about how there are entire cultures and customs that I simply don’t understand because of how I was brought up. But most of all, I am reminded, as my daughter says, “Not to ‘yuck’ someone else’s ‘yum,'” because you have no idea what life circumstances led them to develop the tastes and preferences they now have.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

There’s truth and then there’s Gospel

The books and teachers that influenced me when I first started my spiritual journey are not the same books and teachers that speak to me now. That does not make them any less valuable, however. They are still very much a part of my story. They are part of my spiritual identity, part of my spiritual DNA. 

When I first began seeking God, enlightenment, a spiritual experience, or whatever you’d like to call it, I was attracted to anything and everything that was not Christianity. While I was raised as a Christian, sort of,* I turned my back on God and religion as a teenager. 

As a result, I found spiritual comfort in non-Christian teachings. I was particularly interested in and attracted to Buddhism and Taoism, although I also studied Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and even Zoroastrianism. But Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, was where I found my spiritual home for many years. 

As I made my way, or rather was called back to, Christianity, however, many of the books and teachers whose words used to deeply move me, simply miss the spiritual mark for me now. That doesn’t mean they do not have value. Nor does it mean that they do not offer deep, powerful truths. Rather, the part of me that they once spoke to no longer exists, or has grown and changed into something or someone else. 

But these books and teachers are still part of who I am. They were the building blocks for the spiritual temple that is my life. I owe a debt of gratitude to and have immense respect for them. 

What I have found, however, is that many, if not all, of the teachings and practices that attracted me to Buddhism and its spiritual cousins exist in some shape or form in the vast and deep tradition that is Christianity. I simply was not ready to hear or see that when I first started this journey. 

Whether it is meditation, asceticism, or monasticism, Christianity has some version of it that feels as deep, true, and enriching as anything I found in these other traditions. The difference is that Christianity has God and, more specifically Jesus, guiding, informing, and leading the way through the journey. While I wasn’t ready for this in my youth, it brings my soul comfort, peace, and joy now. 

Coming to know Jesus and accepting him as my lord and savior has opened my heart and mind to so much of what I was unable and unwilling to see because of pride, prejudice, and stubbornness. It is no wonder I was such an insatiable seeker. Until I returned back to Christianity, nothing I read and no one I listened to was going to be good enough. 

I didn’t need spirituality as spirituality. Nor did I need wisdom for wisdom’s sake. What I needed was God. As my college religions professor told me when, after several semesters of studying a variety of religious traditions with him, I asked him what his personal beliefs were, “There is truth in all of these traditions, but in Christianity I have found the Gospel.” 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

*We went to church with my grandparents when we stayed at their house as kids, but my parents never really instilled in us Christian values or taught us about Christianity. Although they did start taking us to church at one point because I asked to go as a means of trying to find a solution to my feeling lost and out of place in this world. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. I still felt lost and out of place. 

Don’t leave all of your ego at the door

Armlocks hurt. This is one of the first lessons a person learns in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, right after they learn how to tap. Tapping is the pressure relief valve of the practice that, for the most part, keeps people safe. 

As long as the armlock is not applied too quickly, the person on the receiving end of it taps, and the person applying it respects the tap and lets go, the pain of an armlock is temporary. It goes a way relatively quickly once the submission is let go of. 

That is to say, if practiced safely, armlocks rarely lead to injuries. A person can get arm-locked hundreds of times over years of practice and competition without taking serious damage. This can cause practitioners to develop a false sense of security when it comes to submissions. There is a tendency, especially in practice, to simply accept the loss and move on. 

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this attitude, as it helps a person to not take training so seriously as to get upset about the many losses they will experience in practice. It also helps a person to continue training for a long time through all of the inevitable ups and downs that come with jiu-jitsu. 

Taking these losses too lightly, however, can become a problem. A person might grow so accustomed to losing that losing itself becomes a habit. It stops meaning anything and, therefore, offers no real motivation to improve. 

If it doesn’t bother a person at all to get submitted, they are likely to make the same mistakes again and again without being driven to change the behavior that is causing them to get put into this compromising position in the first place. For this reason, the idea that a person should “leave their ego at the door” before stepping on the jiu-jitsu mats is neither practical nor useful advice. Without some degree of ego, or at least a healthy amount of pride, a person will have no reason to improve. 

This is why, in my opinion, jiu-jitsu competitions are so important for skill development. On the mats in the academy, a person can roll, tap, and start over against the same person or group of people over and over again without any real sense of consequence. Being able to try again takes a lot of the sting off of the little losses experienced in the academy. 

In a tournament, however, a person really only gets one shot. If they tap, there are no do-overs. Add to this the money and time it takes to go to a tournament, and there are real consequences not doing one’s best. No matter what anyone says, losing in a competition match matters more than losing in practice, and it should.

The pain of a tournament loss lasts much longer than the pain of an armlock. This pain, really the effect of pride and the ego’s desire to win, is the motivational fuel for improvement. Channeled in the right way, it is a powerful tool for growth, as well as skill and mindset development. 

Of course, having too much pride, being overly sensitive about losses, and allowing this to affect one’s attitude and performance isn’t healthy either. The ideal is somewhere in the middle, where a person has just enough pride and ego to want to learn from mistakes and to improve, but not so much that one gets upset over losses. Armlocks hurt, but ultimately jiu-jitsu should be fun and something a person is able to do for a lifetime. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

The gifts of the spirit are meant to be given away

The more I mediate, the more I crave silence. The more I pray, the more I yearn for solitude. The more time I spend in silence and solitude, the more I want to share this experience with others. 

God moves in us in mysterious ways. He changes our hearts and shapes our wills. He draws us ever closer to him, whispering in the quiet spaces, “I love you. come to me.” 

Our job is to listen, to submit to the stillness wherein God resides, for it is there that he is found. This is why “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed (Mark 1:35, NIV).” But Jesus did not stop there and neither should we. 

Jesus went off in solitude and prayed in silence so that he could hear the Father, but then he returned to his community. As important as it was for him to commune directly with God, it was equally important for him to share God’s word and God’s love with the world. The gifts he received from the Father had to be given away in order for them to mean anything. 

This is the work of faith. We trust God enough to give him our time and our attention. We give him our lives. In turn, he gives us salvation, joy, peace, comfort, and so much more, but he gives us these at a price. 

The price we must pay is that we do not get to keep these gifts to ourselves. We cannot hoard God’s love and his blessings. We must give freely of what we have been given, for to try to keep God’s blessings to ourselves is to lose them. 

In order to maintain and grow in our relationship with God, we must sacrifice our selfish desires, aspirations, and fears at the altar of love. We have to die to our old ways and old attitudes so that we can be reborn in God’s image. God, who is eternally giving himself to us through the very fact of our existence, requires that we, too, give ourselves to others in the same way. 

This was a difficult lesson for me to learn, and I still forget it often. I am not living for me. I gave up my life the day I turned it over to God in prayer many years ago, and I reaffirmed this commitment when I died and was reborn with Jesus in baptism last year. My life belongs to God and to those I would serve by his grace, love, and mercy. 

So when I meditate, I am not meditating for myself. The silence is not my own. I am neither its cause nor am I the final recipient of its blessings. It connects me to my creator so that I may be more conscious, present, and attentive to the needs of others. I am merely a vessel. 

Likewise, when I pray, I am not praying for myself. My prayers are not for me alone. They are to make me more useful to God and to my fellows. The solitude within which I seek God gives me the courage, wisdom, and compassion with which I may go into the world to do God’s work. I am merely a servant. 

Jesus gave his life for me so that I may give my life for him. Whatever peace, inspiration, and comfort I receive through grace in prayer and meditation is a gift not for me to keep, but to pass on to others. I am merely a container to be filled by the spirit that overflows from within me for others to experience God’s loving mercy. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Finding God at a social media impasse

I’ve begun to notice that the draw to social media is drawing me away from God. It is taking my peace and giving me little in return besides a few fleeting moments of pleasure when I see a new ‘like’ on one of my posts or when I see someone else’s post that makes me smile for a second. But then it leaves me feeling empty, sad, and full of regret. 

I’ve felt for quite some time that social media is a distraction and, worse, an addiction, but for years I have explained this feeling away by telling myself that it is just a tool and, as with all tools, it is useful as long as it’s not abused. While I still agree with this and acknowledge the value of social media if used discerningly, I fear that, like all addictions, it has begun taking more from me than it is giving. 

Historically, I have used social media to promote my business, to share my blog, and to interact with friends I otherwise might not see or talk to. It would not be an exaggeration to say that our business would not be as successful as it is if it were not for social media. Social media has allowed us to connect with and attract people we otherwise would not have been able to. Recently, however, it just feels like noise, like angry, confusing noise. 

I’m not necessarily blaming the platforms. While social media has certainly changed over the years from what it once was, which was a way to connect and interact with friends, into the algorithm and advertisement driven drama machine it is now, I have also changed. When I first got on social media, I was young, lonely, and interested in connecting with like-minded people. As I’ve matured, and especially as I’ve grown spiritually, I’m less lonely and I’m also less interested in connecting with people simply because I agree with or share certain interests with them. I am looking for something deeper. 

I do still enjoy sharing jiu-jitsu videos, funny memes, and even inspirational videos or quotes with friends and family, but it often feels like the price is too high to pay. Wading through all of the politics, divisiveness, and propaganda just to get to the odd post here and there that I find interesting simply isn’t worth it. Whatever amount of momentary pleasure I get is far outweighed by the feelings of anger, sadness, and disappointment I feel during and after I scroll aimlessly through the swamp of unrest that has become social media. 

Truth be told, I’m not sure I’d even notice this in such a profound way if it were not for my spiritual practices. The more God draws me nearer to him, the less satisfied I have become with other things. In fact, the nearer God draws me to him, the more dissatisfied I seem to become with that which is not God.

Today, for example, I had an amazing morning. I woke up, got my daughter ready for school, did my morning prayer hour, went for a walk with my wife, went to jiu-jitsu class, and talked with some of my friends. When I got home, I took a shower, had a healthy breakfast, and sat down to do some writing and reading. All in all, I couldn’t have asked for a better start to my day, but then I checked social media. Immediately, I felt something shift. 

The disturbing thing is that I didn’t necessarily want to check social media. I can’t even say I checked it out of habit. It was more of an urge. It was like I was being pulled in. 

I was having a great day. I felt connected to God, to my family, and to my friends. I couldn’t have really asked for more. Then, just as I was about to go deeper, just as I was about to get into a good book or do some writing, I felt the need to see what other people were doing, what they were saying, and what they were saying about me. And just like that, after only a few minutes of mindless scrolling, my feeling of peace, joy, and purpose all disappeared. 

I knew exactly what happened and it really bothered me. I locked my social media platforms with the Freedom app I recently installed on my phone, and then went back to what I was doing. The whole experience left me feeling really unsettled. 

What made matters even worse, however, and what still bothers me as I write this, is that, while I was reading and again while I was writing, I reflexively grabbed my phone to check social media more times than I care to admit. I did this even though I was locked out of my accounts and even though I didn’t want to. And somehow, not being able to check my accounts made me feel worse, or at least as bad, as when I did check them. 

This is what addictions are, really, isn’t it? They are unhealthy behaviors that compulsively draw us away from God, often against our better judgment and even against our will. What makes addiction so insidious, however, is that it convinces us that it is helping us, that we can’t live without that to which we are addicted, and that stopping will be more painful than continuing on toward self destruction. 

As I sat there processing this experience, I looked at my books, I looked at my prayer chair, and I looked at my laptop, and thought about all of the things I could be doing to deepen my connection with God or to improve my life, and how scrolling through social media is not one of those things. But the whole thing left me feeling helpless because, as much as I couldn’t imagine a life addicted to social media, I also I couldn’t imagine life without social media. I was and am at an impasse, but I also know that at every impasse, God is waiting for us to choose him, and he will always help us when we are willing. 

And so I remain to pray.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.