Wake Up, Look Up

Foreign hello everyone and thanks for listening to Wake Up Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weirock and in today's episode we're asking the question, is your phone making you less human? And this is prompted by an interesting opinion piece I read in the New York Times by Stephen Barry Anthony called I'm a psychoanalyst and this is what technology is doing to you. And I share the title with you just so that you know that Mr. Barry Anthony is himself a psychoanalyst whose expertise is in measuring the ah, effect that different things have on our psychological and emotional state, in this case technology. He just makes the point that technology is disrupting our emotional depth and relationships. It's disconnecting us from each other. It's disconnecting us from ourselves. He calls it a kind of psychological fog where people struggle to identify their feelings. And, and this one hit me between the eyes, stay with their feelings. In other words, we're so used to scrolling or swiping or changing what's stimulating us that when we deal with feelings that we don't want to think about or, or feelings that we don't wanna sit in, we just find ourselves gravitating towards distraction. And because of our phones, distraction is never actually that far from away. In fact, even, even wellness things, things like mindfulness or meditation are being co opted now by our phones, turning it into quantified data, pushing us to be even more productive in how we seek to be unproductive. In other words, your phone is either distracting you away from things that really matter or turning what should matter into a performance anxiety ridden kind of of thing. And I think for all these reasons as Christians, we need to hear what he's saying and we need to ask our questions about whether our phones are actually helping us or actually hurting us. And let's just start here. Uh, anything that takes us further out of God's pattern for what it means to be human is in essence dehumanizing us. It's turning us into something less than what God intended we when he made us in his image. And I think the biggest way you see this is relational disconnect. You know, we have never been, ah, as a culture more disconnected, more lonely, more alone than we are right now. And our phones are a huge part of that because we don't have to go looking for actual people to find some stimulation, some interaction. Add into that the proliferation of artificial intelligence and now we don't even have to go looking for. For another person to have a conversation. But remember when God made Adam and he put him in the paradise of Eden? Even then, in Genesis 2:18, God said, It is not good for man to be alone. God has wired people and given us a certain kind of mission that makes it so that on our own we wither. It is actually in relationship that we flourish. And if our phones are in the way of pursuing actual relationships, then they are, in essence, agents of withering. Uh, the second thing I want to say is emotional numbness defies God's design in so much as our phones are forming us into people who are not aware of our feelings, who refuse to sit in our feelings. We're out of bounds with God's design. I mean, consider that the writer of Ecclesiastes says, in that long section of Scripture that's pretty well known, there's a time to weep, a, uh, time to mourn, a time to laugh. What he's saying is that part of what it means to be human is we feel these things, we express these things. Ah, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, your favorite app, your favorite reading mechanism. They want to get your eyes off of what you're feeling and onto what they're wanting you to consume. But I wonder if that makes us healthier or if it doesn't just in the end, uh, make us more anxious, more disconnected, more depressed. Suppressing feelings, take this from a master suppressor, is not a way of dealing with them. And in a healthy way to do that, we got to talk, we got to think. Sometimes we have to sit in. And I guess here's the third thing I'm saying. I'm just worried about distraction because remember that Psalm 46:10 says, Be still and know that I am God. There's something about disconnecting from stimulation that creates space for us to hear the voice of God. That was part of the Sabbath rhythm of Israel, of God saying, stop working and be still and sit with me. I just wonder if a few of us wouldn't benefit from Sabbathing from our phones because it's pretty hard to hear the small and still voice of God over whoever's yelling at you on YouTube. Uh, if we don't create space, it won't be that God isn't speaking. It'll just be that the volume is so loud on our phones we aren't hearing them. And remember this busyness is often the enemy of spiritual growth. Jesus says in John 15:4, abide in me and I in you is part of what he's talking about. He's the vine and we are the branches. Connection to him is everything. The problem again though, is it's too easy to reach for your phone. Cultivating a heart that can listen to God is, in some ways hard work. It takes discipline, it takes quiet, it takes vulnerability. And those are not things that we naturally gravitate towards, which is why our phones are there in the first place. Listen, phones are not evil and they can be used for a lot of good. But you got to ask yourself a question. Is this helping me? Or at least the way I'm using it? Is it helping me get closer to a God who loves me? Or is it actually making me less of who that God designed me to be? Hey, thanks for watching this episode of Wake Up. Look Up. If you enjoyed it, please help us get the word out by sharing it with someone you think might benefit from it. 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