Go forth. be informed. love your neighbor.
I was feeling the weight of this when I took up my social media fast in November: I’m looking at a lot of things and ingesting them…but I’m not really digesting anything.
When Bible verses mingle in my feed with dog pictures and razor ads and baby pictures and biblical rebuke and somebody buying a house…I struggle to click the link of life-giving information rather than what’s easy. And when I do click the more worthy link, I’m not really ready to deeply engage with the words there.
There’s irony in writing online about how much the internet is eroding my ability to read other people’s words deeply. But I’m making progress. From giving up Instagram to keeping Facebook off my phone, I feel the pull of it less than I used to.
Most online content is the tasting kind. And since we’re just skimming it anyway, it certainly won’t satisfy. Books are better and can, indeed, be tasted, swallowed, or slowly chewed and digested over for a season or lifetime.
But there’s only one book, one content source, that will leave us filled: “Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst'” (John 6:35).
Downtime is okay. Phones are okay. Even scrolling can be okay. We (I) must simply watch the needle to make sure that we are feeding our souls rather than starving them with loneliness masquerading as novelty.
One holds life; the other never can.
– From The Wardrobe Fast, now available on Amazon.