Why I Trashed My Tweeter

I jumped into Twitter and posted a few times but then I stopped. Not because of any philosphical objection but because I just kept forgetting to tweet and not caring that I had tweeted. But if I had been thinking more deeply about it like SKYE did in this article, then I probably would have written something similar. I am not an anti-twitter tweeterer, nor have I decided to forever silence my tweetering. But for now read the article and you will get some of the same thoughts I was having.

Explaining why he doesn't Twitter, author and editor Skye Jethani writes:

I know I'll get grief for this, but in the 2004 film Shall We Dance?, one character had a really insightful bit of dialogue:

We need a witness to our lives. There are a billion people on the planet … I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things … all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying, "Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness."

We all want our lives to matter, and we believe they only matter if they are noticed by someone. I wonder if this desire for a witness isn't what fuels a lot of blogs, Facebook, and especially Twitter. We want someone, anyone, to take notice … to care about us … to watch us and by their attention communicate, "You matter. Your life counts."

If this is one of the hidden motivations behind Twittering, and I think it is, we're really talking about a spiritual hunger—one that I don't believe can be satisfied online. Perhaps the most significant reason I don't Twitter is because I already have a witness for my life ….

Psalm 139 says it best:

O LORD, you have searched me and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD.

I believe in God's economy there is not a single thought, feeling, or moment that is lost. There is nothing that is unseen or unrecorded …. God is indeed with me and witnessing every thought and reflection. My ideas are not lost, and my life really does matter—not because someone read it, heard it, saw it, or Tweeted it, but because God is my witness.