the blog isn’t real life.

I’ve been scrolling back through our blog, grinning at glossy photos of my kids enjoying spring and our evolving backyard and peaceful family moments from Easter. And with my head full of all of these memories, I want to take the time to tell you something which you may forget: the blog isn’t real life.

Nope, this blog is edited life — just a small snapshot of the living, breathing, messy thing that is the Gentino family.

It may seem self-evident, but dig a bit deeper with me: most of us need to be reminded of this fact from time to time.

Lately I can tell I’m getting older because I’m ceasing to think other people’s lives are perfect. Let me tell you: I’ve been enough places, I’ve heard enough stories to know deep down: No one has it all together. Did you hear that? No one.

Not the stay-at-home mom you eye up at the park who wears flowing printed tops and bohemian accessories, whose child looks like a magazine cover. Not the missionary serving Jesus by raising a family and loving the poor in a loud, colorful, exotic country. Not the successful friend who seems to travel every month and is always throwing parties. Not the made-for-each-other couple whose marriage clearly must be more creative and easy and sexy than yours.

Nope. No one has it all together. I’ve talked to all those people and they certainly don’t feel like their life is perfectly together, no matter what they post on Facebook. They are just like you: with imperfect, sometimes painful lives, trying to celebrate moments of beauty and fun.

But that’s just the thing about the Internet. Most of what we see about other people is the beauty-and-fun snapshots. Or the rants-and-complaints snapshots. Both caricatures flood our newsfeeds day after day and leave us feeling exhausted and disillusioned after awhile. And neither are real life. You and I are more — so much more — than our selfies and our date nights and our political opinions.

I’m not saying that you should do away with the Internet. I’m saying, just keep the Internet in its proper place. Remember that it is never real life.

My desire for this blog is for it to be an honest space. As much as possible, I want to share our family’s everyday life and story with you — whether you’re a family member living in another state or a financial supporter or a friend who has begun to follow us along the way. I want to write about the highs and the lows, my wrestlings and my victories. I want to show you that life is hard and I’m a sinner and there is so, so much hope in Jesus.

I struggle to do all of this well — for lack of time, for lack of ability, and because by very nature of a blog, I most often feature things I’m good at or things I’ve learned how to do. You see the still-life photos of healthy, fresh-made food but not the frozen pizzas or the stack of homeschooling books yet to be opened at 3 pm or the tears over the hurtful words I barked at my child.

The other reason the blog isn’t real life is because this is a public space and there are things that aren’t shared in a public space. Think about your life: I’d wager that many of the experiences that most shape you — the private trials, the conversations, the secrets kept out of respect for another, the betrayals and the deep, intimate expressions of love — are probably things most people don’t know.

I’m all for transparency. I want everyone around me — including you, dear reader — to know I’m a very normal person with sins and limitations and struggles. I want to shout my story from the rooftops because God is making all things new in my tired, performance-driven mess of a life.

But many times it seems that the window into my real life and into some of the ways God shapes me the deepest overlaps with someone else’s story. This isn’t the space for that and true friends are those you trust to protect your story, who guard it like the treasure that it is, whether in conversation with others or online. In that way I’m glad blogs aren’t real life and hope they never become so.

The Internet is limited and that’s okay. Let’s use it to open up windows into our story and to tell of God’s goodness, but let’s not ever let it take the place of a good heart-to-heart on the phone or sitting and crying together in Life group or rejoicing over a cup of tea.

I want to keep working at this thing, this blog. I love it and I’m so grateful to you for stopping in, for using this opened window to read and rejoice and grieve with us, to send encouraging emails and texts, to ask me to write more. I’ll work on being real in this space and not just post endless polished photos and clutter-free anecdotes.

And so I ask one thing of you: will you remember that the blog isn’t real life?

Will you do that?

Will you trust that I’m a normal person, that my family is a normal family? God has created the members of the Gentino family special and unique, He has given us some gifts that we’re learning to embrace and use. He’s also allowed some weaknesses and challenges in all of us that we need help with. Lots and lots of help.

Few things have been more freeing for me as I grow older than to look at the people around me — on the Internet and in life — and believe — really believe — that they are real, just like me.

We’re each of us created by God, living, breathing, terribly messy and beautiful masterpieces.

Isn’t that how you want other people to see you?

A sure way not to love someone is to reduce them to a one-dimensional Facebook photo, “She’s perfect. Their family is perfect. Their marriage is perfect. Their job (house, car, children, church) is perfect.”

I urge you to remove those phrases from your vocabulary and instead to follow the path of life: to embrace the mystery, to embrace the truth that the Internet isn’t real life, to refuse to judge and start actually trying to get to know people.

As I’ve begun to follow this path of life, to trust this truth, I’ve found my need to compare myself to other women or compare the Gentinos to other families, to judge and criticize and correct, fade away. I’ve learned to live in the gray area of knowing that people aren’t black or white, good or bad. I’ve ceased to even need to hear their whole story, to expose their “dirt” in order to believe it (although I’ve invited their stories because they are real, complex people), I’ve learned to listen more instead of casting a glance and cramming someone into a tiny box. I’ve become a better friend. I’ve even become just a better acquaintance.

And so I challenge you to do the same: spend time on the Internet. Use it for the wonderful tool that it is — to connect with your friends and family, to share your beautiful moments and some of your struggles, to give glory to your Maker. Or don’t use certain aspects of it, if the temptation to covet and caricature others is too great.

But in the end remember — every day if you must — that the blog isn’t real life. Real life is deeper and harder and way, way better than the Internet. And I’ll remember it too.