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

by Esther Emery

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 wonder aloud, to that deep dissatisfaction that has so many times driven each of us to speed and distraction and other hamster wheels? Is this all we needed all along? To be more engaged in the underlying processes that fuel our lives?

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.

At first it is a list, an admittedly impressive list of ten amazing things that have happened to me in six months off the Internet. In pieces/parts, it is an impressive transformation: 1. I’m cooking. Real food. Using real ingredients. 2. I’m gardening. 3. I have read and completed forty-six paper books. 4. I am going to church. 5. I have read almost the entire Bible. 6. I am vegan. 7. I have more sex. 8. My husband and I have written and are following a debt-end plan. 9. I have letter correspondence with half a dozen friends, including my husband’s grandmother. 10. It is a regular part of my daily routine that I look closely at a tree and watch the dawn break over the waters of Dorchester Bay.

I wonder how many cars there are on each train, how many trains there are in each city, how many cities. In every train car, are there eleven people on screens and one person crying? In every train car, is there one person going for a year without the Internet?

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.

Go to the silence. In the silence there is glue. And you may find there too that God is already traveling with you—too big to see, and too close to feel, but as unmoving and vast and generous as the sky.