Cell Phone Free

Thursday night my cell phone died.  I’ll get it repaired or replaced and be back and connected, but for now I walk around without the buzz of emails or texts or the ring of the occasional call.  Yesterday because of several meetings and travel I went until three o’clock before checking email and I didn’t actually miss anything critical or important.  This is the case most days and yet I want to know what’s in my inbox every fifteen minutes.  This is a kind of sickness and it permeates our society.  We have to break away from it just as we have to break away from other addictions.

The only way to keep something from being an addiction is quitting it from time to time, giving it a rest.  We need to do this with our digital technologies.  For me this means that I’m going to make an effort to keep Sundays unplugged and disconnected from all digital technologies.  Once a month I’ll work to do the same for the whole weekend.  Through this disconnection I will be reconnected–to the people and places here and now.  This is where God is.