What Falls from the Sky: How I Disconnected from the Internet and Reconnected with the God Who Made the Clouds

by Esther Emery

I’m just trying to find a way to live a life that matters. I’m trying to find a way to feel my life.

If I am going to be spending this much time with myself, some things about me are going to have to change. I’m going to have to be nicer. I’m going to have to be more disciplined. And I’m going to have to be more interesting.

I would have to get out of my house. I would have to greet people in person, get to know my neighbors, have fascinating experiences, and invite people over for dinner. These are the things that would support my hypothesis. But I don’t feel like doing any of those things. Without the Unblog, I don’t feel motivated to do any of those things … because no one is watching.

Was it impossible to imagine putting effort into something if there were no eyes to look at it? Was this true that a life seemed meaningless if it was lived in a place where it could not be seen?

am a very nervous cook and usually will go to great lengths to avoid cooking for other people.

the alternative to screen time is table time.

But as I tell it to the pastor, my faith itself—my belief in good and God and Christ resurrected—has always been there, always held tender and close to my heart. It wasn’t broken by something as weak as human anger. And it doesn’t want to stay inside that old brick wall anymore.

And this is what I love best about our big, loving, beautiful, expansive God. He will take me any way I’ll come: even with my snark, my cynicism, my impulsiveness, my anger and old hurts. Later I will say that my conversion is proof of only one true thing, and that’s the length of God’s arm.

But his refusal to acknowledge my struggle is his refusal to acknowledge me.

There was just more need than there was me.

I want to be a whole person, capable of income earning, but also capable of feeding myself. I want to be a whole person, capable of humility as well as leadership. And I have everything I need to become whole in this way if I can only drop the force of my own resistance.

And who cares anyway? The food is a vehicle. It’s a good thing, and sometimes even a wonderful thing, but it’s also just a thing we all need on the way to being human.

social networking is a natural enemy to humility. Certain kinds of changes are hard to make when you’re performing your identity for the appreciation of a crowd.

I never see things change because I log all my data in a freeze frame, always glancing over on my way to something else.

I would like all this change, and also I wouldn’t. What I’d really like to do is get back on my social networking and waste a hundred hours a week and not feel any responsibility for any of it—not for my lifestyle, or my financial freedom, or the health of my soul.

This is such a wild, heavy thing. To say, “I will choose the way I live.” It’s audacious.

I’m amazed at how alone we all are, each in our separate existence, living as close to one another as we do. We are experts at not seeing one another.

It is the era of hyper-connected isolation.

We are choosing to rank our cerebral independence more highly than our entertainment. We are choosing to value our creativity more highly than our purchasing power.

I learned how to unplug without disconnecting.

I am trying to connect the dots between all the lives I’ve lived and all the heart wounds I’ve tried to close over with stone.

“I have to admit I have thought about leaving. I’ve thought, I’ve got to go. But I also think I’m not going to buy a solution for everything by leaving. When I leave, my efforts, my strengths, my self-esteem, my values—these I will have to sacrifice. Why don’t I stay and contribute to my own country, not spend my effort to fill someone else’s pockets? Why don’t I give what I can give of myself to my own people?”

I can control whether I speak into this situation in fear … or in love. This is the only choice I really get to make.

We are united by choice. Not forced together by propriety, or obligation, or somebody else’s family values, or even fear. We stand together by choice, with our massive, gaping failures, and our wounds, wrapped around each other like koala babies.

she confesses that lately she has found herself often going to the Internet not for any particular reason but just to be there.

When I feel dead, I plant something. When I feel forgotten, I create something. When I feel unforgiven, I pick up the guitar.

It can’t stand still because I can’t stand still. I just have to believe this miracle truth—that God loves me enough to travel with me.

The Internet is different for me now because I am different to it.