It was very sad to read the news, in March, that the host of Love Island, Caroline Flack, committed suicide. Any suicide is a tragedy both for the person who died, and for the ripples of pain of unanswered questions that spread out to the wider family and friends.
It would seem that (after the domestic violence incident at her home) Caroline Flack simply couldn’t face living when she was rejected by so many of her social-media followers.
Newspaper headlines like ‘Caroline Whack’ would have undoubtedly added to her sorrow. In her last Instagram message, which was not published until after her death, she said: ‘My whole world and future was swept from under my feet and my future collapsed’. It seems family and friends were not enough to console her. It seems that she was not just understandably devastated and broken by the unpleasant social-media hype – she felt so finished by it, that her life was now not worth living.
The thing that she lived for, the thing that she gave so much importance to, the thing that she worshipped, finally let her down. It’s a cruel world.
Celebrity culture
But what is it about the world of social media that is so toxic and dangerous? Is it the platforms themselves, such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter? Is it nasty people being nasty?
I want to suggest another reason why this world can be so destructive – it is the absence of any sense of living before the face of a glorious and majestic God. The problem with social media and with celebrity culture in general is that it is a place where people and their view of you shines big and where God and is His thoughts about you don’t figure at all.
Ed Welch, in his book When people are big and God is small, says this: ‘We fear people because they can expose and humiliate us. We fear people because they can reject, ridicule, or despise us. We fear people because they can attack, oppress, or threaten us.’
He goes on to say: ‘These three reasons have one thing in common: they see people as “bigger”, that is more powerful and significant, than God and, out of the fear that creates in us, we give other people the power and right to tell us what to feel, think, and do.’
Grasshoppers
Perhaps then what Caroline Flack needed to know most was the majesty of a God before whom ‘the inhabitants of this world are like grasshoppers’.
It is this kind of amazing God that Isaiah speaks about in Isaiah 40. A God who judges even the great people of this world.
It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in; who brings princes to nothing, and makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness. Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when He blows on them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble. (Isa. 40:22-24).
This is a God who says, look at the oceans: ‘Who else has held the oceans in his hand?’. Look at the vastness of the heavens: ‘Look up into the heavens. Who created all the stars?’
Nothing is a threat to such a God, least of all the opinions and posturing of mere grasshoppers. This God is all-powerful and yet this power is used to care for His people. ‘He will tend his flock like a shepherd; He will gather the lambs in His arms; He will carry them in His bosom, and gently lead those that are with young (Isa. 40:11).
In fact, the whole of Isaiah 40 was written as ‘comfort medicine’ for God’s people as they faced the scary thought of being taken from their native land by a vicious foreign power.
‘Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God”? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength’ (Isa. 40:27-31a).
Comfort
I wonder what a difference it would have made to Caroline Flack if she had known the God that Isaiah describes. I wonder what a difference it would have made to Caroline Flack if she had known her identity was not found in her social-media popularity, but in God’s knowledge of her? To live safely under God’s care. To know The Lord as that strong tower we can take refuge in during times of trouble (Prov. 18:10).
For us as parents, teachers, pastors, friends to young people growing up in this toxic environment ‘where people are big’, we need to assure our children that they can find their identity and meaning in living before God.
As Welch suggests, people are scary, fear of rejection by our peers can be very painful, particularly in the school environment, but knowing they are accepted in Christ and feeling that love and acceptance within the local church can be a wonderful comfort and support for our young people caught up in a cruel and judgemental culture. To know that we can shelter from the storms of life under his majestic wings is a wonderful comfort.
In her book, Give Them Grace: dazzling your kids with the love of Jesus, Elyse Fitzpatrick says: ‘Give grace to your children today by speaking of sin and mercy. Tell Susan that she can relax into God’s loving embrace and stop thinking that she has to perform in order to get her welcoming Father to love her. Tell David that he can have hope that even though he really struggles, he’s the very sort of person Jesus loved being around. Dazzle them with his love.’
