The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

by Andy Crouch

Technology is in its proper place when it helps us take care of the fragile bodies we inhabit. It’s out of its proper place when it promises to help us escape the limits and vulnerabilities of those bodies altogether.

When we let technology replace the development of skill with passive consumption, something has gone wrong.

No matter how big your house, it’s not big enough to hide your foolishness from people who live with you day after day.

Without a doubt, compared to human beings just one century ago, we are more globally connected, better informed about many aspects of the world, in certain respects more productive, and—thanks to GPS and Google Maps—certainly less lost. But are we more patient, kind, forgiving, fearless, committed, creative than they were? And if we are, how much credit should technology receive?

our lives are easier than our grandparents’. But in what really matters—for example, wisdom and courage—it seems very hard to argue that our lives are overall better. Perhaps, just perhaps, they are no worse. But this is exactly what we would expect if the things that really matter in becoming a person have nothing to do with how easy our life is—and

In the history of the human race, boredom is practically brand new—less than three hundred years old. The English word does not appear until the 1850s, and its parent word bore (as a noun—“he is such a bore”) appears only a century earlier.

If you pay attention, you cannot possibly get bored in a meadow. It is all too easy to be bored on a lawn.

we become people who desperately need entertainment and distraction because we have lost the world of meadows and meteors.

Boredom is actually a crucial warning sign—as important in its own way as physical pain. It’s a sign that our capacity for wonder and delight, contemplation and attention, real play and fruitful work, has been dangerously depleted.

All addictions feed on, and are strengthened by, emptiness.

At its best, worship transforms us, making us people capable of things we could never work up the capacity or courage for on our own: the ability to sacrifice, to love, to repent, to forgive, and to hope.

singing may be the one human activity that most perfectly combines heart, mind, soul, and strength. Almost everything else we do requires at least one of these fundamental human faculties: the heart, the seat of the emotion and the will; the mind, with which we explore and explain the world; the soul, the heart of human dignity and personhood; and strength, our bodies’ ability to bring about change in the world. But singing (and maybe only singing) combines them all. When we sing in worship, our minds are engaged with the text and what it says about us and God, our hearts are moved and express a range of emotions, our bodily strength is required, and—if we sing with “soul”—we reach down into the depths of our beings to do justice to the joy and heartbreak of human life. To sing well—not in the sense of singing in perfect tune or like a professional, but in this sense of bringing heart, mind, soul, and strength to our singing—is to touch the deepest truths about the world. It is to know wisdom. And it’s also to develop the courage and character to declare that God is this good, that we are this in need of him, that we are this thankful, that we are this committed to be part of his story.