2. Simple Unplugging

Welcome back, friends. So good to be with you here in session two. Now, before we jump into this session, let's practice the pause. We're gonna take 60 seconds for our one-minute pause right here at the beginning, and we’re to release everything to Jesus, all right? Jesus, I give everyone and everything to you. So let's practice that now...

Jesus, I give everyone and everything to you. What do I need to release, Lord? What do I need to give over right now?

I know it's hard, isn't it? 60 seconds is all we're asking our soul for, and the distractions that come rushing in, the cares and concerns—that’s why learning to practice this is going to become an enormous grace in your life. Because what's happened in this mad world that we're living in is we’ve literally trained our souls not to know what to do with downtime, with just some breathing room. We're so uncomfortable with it. You know what we all do? We reach for this little baby, right? Any bit of margin, any bit of downtime now, anywhere in our culture, you see everybody reaching for their phones, right?

I was meeting a friend the other day for lunch, and I got there early—about 10 minutes early. I was sitting in my car, and I just did the instinctive thing. We just immediately reach for the technology. We reach for the web, we reach for the connection, right? And I catch myself and go, "Wow, I used to be a guy that enjoyed downtime. I used to enjoy just listening to a little music or looking out the window. I love people watching, dog watching, seeing what's going on in the world.” But we are actually in love now—dare I say, addicted to distraction. You go to any public place now—schools, campuses, airports, even the sidewalk after church. Everybody's got their phone out. It's amazing. You can just look down the row, and everybody is on their mobile devices.

I said last week we are spending four hours of our day on our mobile devices and three hours on apps. This thing is consuming our attention. So, be honest now—this little thing chirps at you, vibrates, or barks and lets you know that you have an incoming text. Do you typically ignore it for a few minutes and go on with the conversation that you're having, or enjoy the book that you're reading? No, we all immediately respond right, like Pavlov's dog. We reach for this thing. Are you comfortable in the evening, when you get home, turning your phone off and leaving it off until the morning? Right. Neil was never so attached to the Matrix as we are to technology.

And the thing is, we're trying to get our lives back, we're trying to create some soul space, we're trying to breathe and find a little bit of room for God in our lives. And so, we're going to have to deal with our consumption and our attachment to technology. One of the most important books to come out recently on technology and our cultural moment is called "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr—what the internet is doing to our brains. Carr almost won the Pulitzer Prize for it. What he unveils in this book is that our use of media, particularly the internet, social media, our mobile devices, and how we consume information, is literally changing the way we think and the way we process. It's shortening our attention span.

And he did a fascinating experiment. He went out and interviewed a number of PhDs, doctors, researchers, scientists, and academics who are devoted to the world of books and lengthy articles and research and learning, and unanimously, they confided in him that none of them can read books anymore, that they even find blog posts too long, that the internet has changed the way that they absorb information. They want to, you know, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip through things. They want the quick touch and move on, you know, the quick look, and then go on to the next thing. And as I'm reading, I'm realizing this is what has happened to me. I used to be a guy that loved his free time. I was a guy who could do puzzles, repaint furniture, and enjoy projects, but I noticed that I could only do it for about five minutes before finding myself looking for the next thing. I’d kind of go from project to project and book to book and then back to email to email and video to video. It's literally changing my ability to give things my attention.

And friends, this isn't just a cultural crisis or kind of the allure of technology. This is actually a spiritual crisis because, down through the ages, the saints have believed that our souls’ need for love and restoration, for intimacy and connection with God, all hinged on our ability to give God our attention.

Okay, so let's contrast this technological life with the life that we read about in Psalm 1. "Oh, the joys of those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or stand around with sinners, or join in with mockers. But they delight in the law of the Lord, meditating on it day and night. They are like trees planted along a riverbank, bearing fruit each season. Their leaves never wither, and they prosper in all they do. But not so the wicked. They are like chaff scattered by the wind."

So, two types of experience are being described here, two sorts of soulful realities. You have the life of the person that is so green and lush, evergreen really, because its roots are down into the river of God, into the river of life. And that person is able to meditate on the beauty and the goodness of God. They're able to give sustained attention to God, as compared to the other soulful experience, which is so ephemeral and light, so shallow. It's literally like chaff that's just blown away on the wind.

Did you know that there is a direct correlation—research is showing—between our amount and consumption of social media and the rise of anxiety and depression in our culture? That's the chaff, that's the shallows, that's this world changing our soulful experience of reality. This is not good for the soul, right? The American Academy of Pediatrics doesn't even want kids to look at screens if you can keep them from it, okay? And it's sort of like smoking. You go, "Well, yeah, we shouldn't let kids do that, but it's okay if adults do, as long as it's gonna kill you. But that's okay.” Like, no, we're talking about getting our lives back here.

And here's the other problem. In our first session, I talked about the tsunami of information coming at us when we remain totally plugged into the world out there and the internet and technology. The thing is this: you have all of the sorrows and all of the heartache of the entire planet delivered daily to you on your mobile device. And no human soul was ever made to endure that. The human soul is finite. You were meant to live within a community and within a world in which you could pray for, care for, and love and not be overwhelmed by. It's not good. We were never made to endure all of the horror and the trauma and the latest atrocity constantly coming at us because we're plugged in.

We're trying to get our lives back. We're trying to create a little bit of breathing room so that we can actually be human beings again. And it's not just mobile phones and laptops and the internet, friends; there is actually a war on our attention. I pulled into the gas station the other day just to fill up. And as soon as I engage the pump, this television screen pops on and starts blaring commercials at me. It's like, I can't get away from this stuff. I hopped in a taxi to get to the airport, and the same thing. There's a screen on the back seat, and it starts blaring commercials at me. If you fly anywhere, they now know that you are a trapped participant, and suddenly, they start showing you advertisements, you know, on the seat in front of you before the plane takes off. Everywhere you go, there are advertisements on your shopping cart. There is a war on our attention, friends.

So here's what we're going to do right now. If you're doing this in a group, we're going to pause. Everybody's going to take out their phone and put it on airplane mode if you haven't done that yet, okay? And then I want everybody to hand their phone to the host, and you're going to take that stack of phones and put them in the next room. We're just going to separate ourselves a little bit. It's okay. It's okay. You'll get your phone back in just a few minutes. You're going to be all right. Everybody just breathe. Just take a breath, no anxiety. But isn't it fascinating? We do not want to let go of this thing for even a few moments. So, if you're by yourself, what I want you to do is pause, take this thing into another room, and leave it there through the rest of the session.

The Desert Fathers were a beautiful, holy, ragtag group of believers in the early centuries of the church that went away from society in order to try and find a soulful life again, to recover from what they thought was the toxicity of the world. They felt that society was a shipwreck from which every person had to swim for their life. Now, let's remember, there was no electricity, there was no technology, no freeways, no email, and no internet, right? It wasn't even an automobile. Everyone walked everywhere they went. Human life was literally at the pace of three miles an hour. And they didn't have all of the tragedies of the entire planet delivered to them daily. They only had the cares of their community, and yet they still felt that somehow, to have a real life with God, they had to unplug from their worlds.

I mean, how much more do we? As the book of Hebrews says, "Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders, and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus."

These scriptures are not meant to be scolding. They're not meant to be rebukes. They're not given in that spirit at all. Nothing that I'm offering is given in the spirit of a reprimand. It is a lifeline being thrown to us by God, and learning to be able to let go of all the hindrances of the world and just give Jesus a little bit of our attention is absolutely life-giving, joyful, and transforming.

So here's the formula. Here's where we're headed. Your soul is one of the greatest gifts you've ever been given by God. Your soul is what enables you to laugh and love and live and enjoy the things that you enjoy. Your soul is a vessel that God fills. We are meant to be filled with the life of God, with the love of God, but the double-bind is this: In this hour, in this moment, we need strong and resilient souls to resist this madness that we're describing in our world. And yet, it's that very madness that is taking our attention away and sort of shrinking our souls down with harriedness and being scattered and fried to the point that we can't receive the graces that God is giving to us.

That's why these practices are so important: the one-minute pause, benevolent attachment, unplugging a little bit from our lives. It's time for sort of a new era of the desert fathers and mothers. We're going to be those people. We're going to be counter-cultural by not living attached to the chaos out there.

So here are some things friends of mine are doing. I've got one family friend group that has a cell phone locker in their garage. And when everybody gets home—they have teenage children, so this is super important—when everybody gets home in the evening, they drop their phones in the locker, and they've created a technology-free zone in their house so that people can actually have real conversations with real human beings. And it has become revolutionary for their family life. They fought it at first, but now they are loving it. They're loving the margin out of the drama, free of that.

Some other friends have a rule—no cell phones in bedrooms. I think that's a good one. Nobody gets to take their cell phone into their bedroom in the evening. When you go in to rest, or have a marriage, and conversation, and intimacy, and process your day, you shouldn't be sitting there both isolated on your feet—so no cell phones in the bedrooms. Just simple practices that I describe in the study guide and unpack more in the book that will guide you in really easy steps to unplug from your world. I'm not saying again that we all have to become monks and retire to the mountains. We have a real life. We have a real world. We're all living in this, but you can take simple steps to get your life back, and you're going to love it.