God Exchanged My Youtube Addiction for a Special Gift
Giving Up My Dream
“It’s okay, God,” I prayed. I was in the passenger seat of our car, watching cracked earth lots and droopy palm trees speed past my window. “I don’t have time to do everything. And there are a lot of other people who do this better than me, so I’ll just give up my music.”
It was 2021, shortly after the release of my first book. I’d always loved music and had often written songs that I shared in churches. My husband Joshua and I had met in choir. But with two kids to homeschool, local ministry to help with, fundraising adventures, many relationships to nurture, writings to write, and a bunch of miscellaneous tasks to attend to, I felt that something had to go.
So I gave up music.
I stopped writing it, stopped running to my guitar with new ideas, never sat down at the piano. It wasn’t making a difference, so it didn’t make the cut, and I cut it out of my life.
But for the next two years, I felt a sad longing in my heart for music. I kept telling myself and God, “It’s okay. I can’t do everything.” And with that less-than-comforting thought, I went on with my life. Until one day when Joshua left for a trip.
Joshua has been going on trips since we began as gospel seed sowers in 2010. I don’t mind. I never suffer from boredom because I have about a billion ideas and projects to keep me company. And we always come back together with stories to share. But I have struggled with anxiety. Particularly in the evenings when it’s quiet and dark and the kids are in bed. And my main solution to that affliction was YouTube.
YouTube was my shelter in a time of storm. It was my song in the night, my comforter, my counselor. Whether I was watching clips of Hoarders to get myself to clean or clips of Saturday Night Live to feel connected to my home country, I spent hour after hour bent over staring at a screen that couldn’t see or hear me.
I spent seven years among people who actually bow down to idols. You’d think I would have recognized the one in my own hand. But I didn’t.
That day, as I saw Joshua off at the airport, clutching my brick of a smart phone in my hand, a still small voice whispered to my heart.
“What if you gave that to me, just for this week?” It was a reasonable request. I knew YouTube was a major time suck, and I felt a little guilty about that. So I covenanted with God not to use my phone for entertainment while Joshua was away.
I went home, unsure what to do with myself. The kids were playing with neighbors, hooping and hollering in Arabic. The house was still. Instinctively, I walked to the piano and sat down. And this is what I wrote:
The word of the Lord came, ‘Arise and go.
Warn that great city, for I have compassion on their souls.’
So he got up and found a ship to sail the sea
Away from the presence of God to flee.
Lord, I judge Jonah, but I, too, run from the threats
Of my enemy, who does not know his right hand from his left.Heart of Jonah, running away with me
Heart of stone, sink down to the deep
Heart of Christ, live anew in me
Heart of Jonah, be buried in the sea.
My mouth fell open as I scribbled those last few words on a random piece of paper. I got goosebumps. Where had that come from? Over the next ten days I wrote more than ten songs. It was like a miracle.
And when Joshua came home, I got back on YouTube.
Heart Surgery
Over the coming months, new songs and Scripture songs continued to come fairly frequently. But so did an increasing uneasiness about YouTube. This I mostly justified or ignored.
The evening was the perfect time for Joshua to meet with people to share and discuss the Good Book, and it’s not like I could do ministry at 10 p.m. when my kids were asleep. And I was too anxious to fall asleep myself, anyway.
Yet I didn’t exactly feel good about my relationship with YouTube. I kind of wanted to stop watching it, and I sometimes tried. But I kind of couldn’t. Something in me loved and depended on it. I was trapped — and somewhat prophetically penned these lyrics without fully understanding them:
When you are held hostage
Hostage to yourself
And you wonder who will be the one to come and let you go
When you’ve lost the way
To the paths of righteousness
And you long for deliverance from this body of death
Don’t forget
God gives grace to the humble.
Then, one year ago, a pastor came to our country of service to conduct a “revival” for the gospel seed sowers. A missionary to the missionaries, if you will. He encouraged us to pray each evening for God to awaken us in the morning, because He knows how much time we need with Him. I started to do that, and it was meaningful. On the last day, the pastor stood and reminded us of a well-known Bible verse:
“I’m sure you’ve heard Ezekiel 36:26: ‘I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.’ Now, what should you do if you need a heart transplant? Literally the only thing you can do is show up for your surgery. Today we’re showing up for that surgical appointment. If there is something you can’t remove from your own life, whether it’s bitterness, a beloved sin, or something else, we’re going to take time today to show up for the promised appointment.”
As people around me bowed their heads, I knelt and squeezed my eyes shut. My mind was blank.
“God, do I need heart surgery?” I asked. “Is there anything in my life You want to remove?”
“YouTube.”
“Oh.” It was then that I finally realized I loved something God did not want for me. I depended on something other than God to find grace for today and bright hope for tomorrow. I finally saw that something so small, so aesthetic, so seemingly harmless, had become a huge and heavy weight God had not given me to carry.
“Okay,” I prayed. “I’m here for the promised heart surgery. Um . . . You have my permission to take out YouTube.”
God heals addiction in many ways. Sometimes it’s immediate, sometimes it takes time. But I testify to you today that from that moment God has given me total and complete victory and freedom over YouTube. I have no compulsive or addictive feelings towards it. It is buried in the bottom of the sea. On the rare occasion I use it for a tutorial or something else, it does not have the same charming, winsome, sparkly, colorful draw that it did before. I am free!
Around that same time, I was asked by a mission organization to produce an album, utilizing songs from various missionaries. So I did. I’ve thrown my heart into that project for the past year, spending my evenings confronting my anxiety with God and with music and finding healing I didn’t know was possible.
And today that album, featuring fifteen songs by missionaries, two of which are my original compositions and several others of which I co-wrote, will be released on every major streaming platform. The organization chose to title the album after one of my songs: “Give Us a Dream.”
God’s Invitation
Just yesterday I ran across this verse in my Bible: “Godly sorrow produces repentance that leads to salvation, which leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death” (2 Corinthians 7:10).
This verse so perfectly expresses the way I feel now. I have been so tempted to grieve the years and years and hours and hours I wasted, the unwritten songs, the healing I could have had earlier. But the joy of the Lord over my newfound freedom does not let me grieve too hard. I feel too relieved to grieve. Too relieved that I am bound no more. Too relieved that God has given me back the dream He never asked me to give up.
I thought I didn’t have time to pursue an art form that I loved because our overseas ministry was more important. Ministry to my children, our host country, our donors, my family. Music, something I loved dearly, felt extravagant and superfluous.
But God prioritized music for me because through it He could minister to me. It was always important, not because I’m the only one who can do it or because I can compete with the best musicians out there, but because it is something God gave me. It’s one of His gifts to me. It’s a way I can process, worship, grieve, and celebrate before the Lord.
When I was finally willing to give up my idols, one of the first things God did was give me back the gift of music. And, to my surprise, He has used what He gave me to bless others, not from a place of striving, but from a place of peace.
What is God asking you to give up? What gifts does He want to give you in the place of those things? If you’ve resonated with this article and feel the need for a heart transplant, He is only a prayer away. And all He asks is that you show up for your appointment. He’ll take care of the rest.
Click here to check out the album Give Us a Dream.
This article originally appeared on A Life Overseas.
