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To be without the constant availability of distraction is solitary confinement, a punishment to be most dreaded. That is why in those moments when we realize we have forgotten our phone, lost it, or let the battery run out, we taste the captivity of a prison cell, and it can be frightening.
“we want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.”
we must die to the idea that a distraction-free life is possible—it is not, and it never has been. The holy life is piously complex, meaning we must learn how to apply distraction management in every situation.
we must make it our aim to purge our lives of all unnecessary and unhelpful distractions.
“Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink [modern technology for John]. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12). John used technology to communicate, but he knew that his letter was only part of the communication. It was a way of expressing anticipation; face-to-face fellowship had to follow.
Imagine setting aside a few weeks of your summer vacation to travel on dirt roads and bump around in loud jeeps, winding deep into remote jungle villages in Central America. You risk fevers, diseases, and heatstroke, all in order to help build an orphanage for twenty destitute kids. At the end of the month, you step back, take a selfie with your handiwork in the background, and post it with pride on Facebook. Poof!—the reward is gone. Think about it. In one humble-brag selfie, the trade is made—eternal reward from God is sold for the porridge of maybe eighty likes and twelve comments of
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The Bible is not a book to “get through,” to read cover to cover and then put on a shelf; neither is it a book to browse or skim. The Bible is our open door to hear God’s voice both alone and together in community. It is intended to be bottomless in its profundity and endless in its relevance. It is less of a book and more of a world of revelation in which we live and move and have our being.
Social media are far too new, too contemporary, too close, too much like me to tap into the greatest benefit of literacy.
“People used to do things and then post them, and the approval you gained from whatever you were putting out there was a byproduct of the actual activity. Now the anticipated approval is what’s driving the behavior or the activity, so there’s just sort of been this reversal.”
Take C. S. Lewis and Augustine. I love them both, but I would rather have a beer with Lewis. Lewis would order us a really good beer, just because it was a really good beer, with his understanding of God suffusing the whole. For him, while the thickness of creation can become an idol, a rival to God, it is intended for us as a sermon by God about God. And you can’t honor the preacher by ignoring the sermon. But Augustine would perhaps think that a thin beer would help us think of Jesus more, not distracting us quite so much, and that when we had really advanced in grace, we might be able to
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We are all hungry, thirsty, and needy for sustenance outside of us, but we give our attention and wealth to trying to satisfy our most essential longings with the goods and the vices so easily tapped on our phones. Therapeutic materialism is a scam. We order boxes of new goods that will never heal us and we buy bags of comfort food that will never truly comfort us, all because we are blind to the free gifts of God offered in his Son, Jesus Christ, whose body and blood have been given to us to sustain our eternal life and to feed the flourishing of our unceasing joy.
our phones make it possible to share and consume a steady diet of information that is pointless beyond making us feel connected to others. This is phatic communication—trivial knowledge that is shared to maintain some sort of social bond, but not to convey ideas
While there are many “one anothers” in the Bible, “compare one another” is not one of them,
I do not have “time to kill”—I have time to redeem.
God will judge our digital conversations, private texts, and public tweets by the intentions of our hearts.
“I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”
God is the sovereign King who will not bow to our gadget mastery. Apps can help me stay focused on my Bible reading plans and help me organize my prayer life, but no app can breathe life into my communion with God.
