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Conference Challenge

I love General Conference weekend and all it entails. My family has created many traditions around these two weekends each year, which makes the experience even more enjoyable and anticipated. I loved the challenge President Nelson gave in the women's session about taking a 10-day fast from media and other things that may cause you to have impure thoughts. The Church has talked a lot about using social media as a positive platform to express beliefs, truths, and positive, uplifting comments in order to change the current trend with negative and impure content saturating the web. So I thought it was interesting that President Nelson would challenge us to take a 10-day fast from social media as opposed to posting positive content on our feeds. This challenge, though I am in the middle of it now, has taught me so far that even though media can be used for so much good, we must not be so focused on it every day. It shouldn't take up every waking spare moment that we have (like it does often times for me). Sometimes, in fact many times, we need to clear our lives of the media that can drive the spirit away--even if it is not necessarily inappropriate media. For me, the media that prevents me from listening to the spirit isn't the horrible content that is found online because Satan knows he can't get me to look at that kind of media. Instead, it is the good media that is just a distraction that keeps me from letting my free moments be filled with spiritual impressions. That, perhaps, is one of Satan's greatest tools: if he can get God's children to be so consumed in social media, he can get us to stop listening and waiting for the spirit to speak to us.
So with this challenge, I hope to not only fast for 10 days from social media but to also cut back significantly on how much I engage in it going forward. I will be able to get so much more accomplished and will be able to be more sensitive to the spirit as President Nelson promised.

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