Today, I’m doing something I haven’t done before on this blog – linking to a few things I enjoyed and only commenting on them briefly. It’s my first post in what might be called the “mishmash” category.

Social media and things which demand our attention: Do they help us get where we want to be?

The other day, our friend Sharon Tseng wrote about a book she’s read, “12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You”, and she looks at how she’s re-considering and re-evaluating how she uses social media. She also has a new practice of “screen-free Sundays”, and she writes about some of the benefits of this for her life and her family. It’s well worth the read. The book looks worthwhile, too; she gives a couple key quotes:

the human appetite for distraction is high in every age, because distractions give us easy escape from the silence and solitude whereby we become acquainted with our finitude, our inescapable morality and the distance of God from all our desires, hopes and pleasures…

and

What I was most afraid of missing out on was not information, but affirmation. I discovered how attached, or maybe addicted, I was to the small daily dose of reassurance that other people ‘like’ me and ‘follow’ me…This desire for personal affirmation is perhaps the smartphone’s strongest lure, and it is only amplified when we feel the sting of loneliness or suffering in our lives. At the first hint of discomfort, we instinctively grab our phones to medicate the pain with affirmation. This habit could not be more damaging.

In very close proximity, Tim Challies posted asking, “How do you feel about your 170 hours of TV so far this year?”, giving a number which is I assume based on American averages. He basically asks, if you’ve set goals for reading this year, are you making any headway on those? Or are you spending five hours a day watching TV and not getting anywhere on reading? He asks:

How have you been using your time, and how do you want to use your time?

These two posts seemed rather related to me, in that both challenge us to ask how we’re using our time and whether it really benefits us in any way, or whether we’re instead wasting it running after something which can never satisfy us. Social media, for example, will never make us truly happy or content. And TV, while it can entertain and relax, can never solve our problems. This doesn’t mean we should give up these things, but I think it means we need to examine ourselves carefully and ask why we use media in the ways we do, what we seek from it, and whether we are using our time in the ways God calls us to.

Sometimes, I worry that with these devices always in our pockets and entertainment at our fingertips 24x7, we’ll seldom think deeply about important issues and instead constantly be caught up with whatever seems most urgent at the time. Or, what if we never examine ourselves deeply enough to see our sins and repent of them? Perhaps instead of considering our problems and seeing how God alone can solve them and thus turning to him, we become content with distracting ourselves and forgetting about our problems. I worry we may easily substitute entertainment and urgency for spiritual growth.

Coincidentally, a post from The Gospel Coalition today echoes some of those same ideas, including this part about the alerts and notifications which are always there to distract us and entertain us:

Your smartphone, Gmail, text chains, and social alerts aren’t just reducing your productivity—they’re reducing your capacity for sustained attention and fracturing your presence.

The whole thing is worth a read.

A “spoken word” gospel presentation

For some reason, I’d never heard of the general category of performance art called spoken word until last week, when my church’s college pastor showed us this great “spoken word” gospel presentation. It’s a very enjoyable spoken/poetic performance of some of the key ideas of the gospel, the core of Christianity. The content is great, and has some really memorable lines. It’s well worth five minutes of your time.

Kids take time, and it’s worth it

For some reason I’d clicked on an article on the inefficency of motherhood which deals with how kids take time which we, as parents, can easily feel might be “more efficiently” spent elsewhere. A key quote:

Instead of correcting the time-taking toddlers, Jesus corrected the kingdom-driven adults who didn’t have time for the children.

It sparked me to think for a minute about when I get most frustrated with my kids. Often, I’m a fairly patient person and most people have never seen me angry, but it does happen from time to time. However, if I think about the times I’ve gotten most frustrated with my kids, a good fraction of them are those where they upended my priorities. Well, my priorities are not always God’s priorities, this article reminds me. God calls me to do his work, not to check everything off my to-do list.