Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How to Beat Digital Distraction and Live Purposefully | Keith & Patrick

Episode Date: February 20, 2020

"Phillip Morris just wanted your lungs. The app store wants your soul." -Bill Maher Technology helps us go faster and get more done. But could speed and convenience cost us a meaningful life? Does going faster matter when we don't know what we're moving towards? Technology isn't the problem. Distraction is. But the constant stream of notifications, likes, emails, and text messages are precisely what distracts us from spending time on what we actually value. In this episode, https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Keith) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick) share how they're fighting against digital distraction in order to live purposefully. Interested in more content like this? Listen to Keith's sermon https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/media-feeds/never-get-high-on-your-own-supply/ (Never Get High On Your Own Supply) from our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/series/genesis/ (Genesis series). Also, make sure to check out the Resources and Related Episodes listed below. Are you struggling with the speed and stress of daily life? Lots of people are. That’s why we created a 10-day devotional to help you rest and reset. Sign up for it https://info.thecrossingchurch.com/rest-and-recovery-daily-devotionals (here). To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Facebook), https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. In this episode, Patrick and I are going to discuss distractions and technology, and we're going to try to do it from a Christian worldview. We as Christians know that we are accountable to God for our lives, accountable to Him for our words, and really every part of our life, including our time. What we do with our time, we have to eventually give an answer to God for, so we need to be wise stewards of it. Psalm 90 tells us to teach us to number our days. In other words, think through what kind of life that we want to live, because life here will be gone before we know it. Most Christians aren't tempted to really run away from God, as much as we are tempted by distractions, to be distracted from a meaningful life that God has called us to.

I think of stories about churches behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet Union, East Germany, all the Iron Curtain countries, and how they had to withstand incredible pressure. They had to sometimes withstand the exile of their church leadership. Sometimes people in the churches wouldn't get jobs because they professed Christian faith. It was difficult to find a place to meet. Many times they didn't have access to all the Bibles that they wanted. And yet somehow those Christians were able to withstand that outside government. pressure. But one thing that the churches behind the iron curtain were not able to stand were the

pornographic images and the sexual immorality that came when the wall, the iron curtain, came down. So here are these churches. Picture them. They're able to withstand years and years, decades of external pressure, but the internal temptations are what ended up corrupting them and pulling them far away from God. And in some ways, I feel like that is where we are, except not necessarily with sexual morality, although, of course, that's a serious issue. But in this instance, in distractions, it's not so much that we are going to run away from God. It's not so much that we are going to flip God off, as it is that we're going to be distracted away from living a meaningful life that really makes a difference for the kingdom of God. I think one of the problems that we have is we

Christians. We haven't necessarily yet done a great job of evaluating our relationship with the technology that's distracting us. And it kind of makes sense because it didn't all happen at once. Facebook starts in 2004, and I remember when it started. It was kind of a novelty. Like, oh, here's a fun thing. You put it in your profile. And no one really checked it that regularly. And the same thing goes with the iPhone. I mean, if you look at Steve Jobs' first big presentation, he presented it as a phone and iPod combination. He had no idea about the app store. In fact, it doesn't even come up until about 40 minutes into the presentation of the iPhone. No one intended for us to get exactly where we are today. And yet slowly, over time, as technology developed and innovated,

we've got into a point now where the average American is spending anywhere from three to some studies nine hours a day on their phones. I mean, most people I talk to, people who I think are pretty conscious about their phone use, they tell me, you know, honestly, I spend about an hour and a half to three hours on my phone. There's a great quote by the German writer Guta. He says, if I know how you spend your time, then I know what might become of you. If I'm spending an hour and a half to three hours a day looking at my phone, what would he know about me? What would he know would become of me? One of my favorite questions is a pastor when I'm meeting with people who are struggling with things to actually ask them and say, hey, what kind of person do you want to be in

10 years. What kind of character do you want to have? Where do you want to be in your life? And I usually do that because I want them to see that some of the decisions they're making are taking them in the exact opposite direction. More and more, though, I've become concerned that the decisions that are taking them in the wrong direction are tiny little micro decisions that they're making throughout their days that are enslaving them subconsciously to their phones, to these digital distractions that are stealing away time in their life. Okay, let's make sure we are on the same page. Technology is not the problem. So you won't find Patrick and I criticizing technology. We tend to love our technology. I've got an iPhone. I've got an Apple Watch. I'm judging him for the Apple Watch.

Seems a little excessive to me. But we're not anti-technology at all. We kind of like tech. The problem isn't with the technology. The problem is inside of us and how we use the technology. The problem is not technology in the sense that technology now distracts us and we've never had to face distracts. in the past. People have always been distracted. It's just that technology is the contemporary way that distraction manifests itself in our life. I think I'd press that even a step further and say that technology is being designed now to get our attention. People are able to make a pretty good living if I spend a lot of time looking at their app. I mean, Facebook hasn't produced Facebook or Instagram or the various social media platforms that they've created out of the kindness of their

hearts. They're doing it because it's a pretty good business plan. And the more eyes that they have on their screens and the longer those eyes stay on those screens, on their pages, the more money that they're going to make. And so they pay people really, really good money to engineer their websites to keep our attention on them as long as possible. So I agree, technology is not the problem. But just like smoking cigarettes is an addictive thing, I do think that these apps and these websites have been designed to some degree addict us to keep us on them. How much does Facebook cost you to use? How much does Snapchat or Instagram or any of the social media platforms? How much do you have to pay on an annual basis to use them? What's kind of a dumb question, right? The answer is obvious.

It's zero. So then how do they make their money? Well, they make their money off of you. You are the product. Having your eyeballs on them so that they can put their advertisements and other stuff on there. That's how they make their money. And so like Patrick said, there are all these people on the other side of your phone seeking to keep you engaged because that's how they become profitable. I read, I think it's true, it seems to come from a reliable source, that slot machines make more money in a year than Major League Baseball, theme parks, and movies combined. And the strategies they're used in slot machines to keep people engaged are a lot of the same strategies that are are used when it comes to social media.

Yeah, they do things like the special colors that grab your eye. Another interesting example is if we know that we're going to get a reward on a regular basis, that reward is much less satisfying to it. So if I know you're going to give me a chocolate donut, Keith, and you know I like chocolate donuts, you're going to give it to me. He's laughing because he keeps buying them for me. He's trying to make me fat. If you give me a chocolate donut once every hour,

it will be less satisfying to me than it would if you gave it to me. me on a random basis. And that's how slot machines work. It's random. Who knows when you're going to win? But that's actually the exact same engineering behind likes. You don't know when you're going to get the like. You don't know how many you're going to get. And that exact fact is something that keeps you addicted to seeing how many people have liked this, how many people have commented. We are hardwired to respond well to those kinds of rewards. I would suggest that getting Patrick to eat a chocolate donut is not very difficult. You don't have to have a big degree or pay me a lot of money. It's pretty simple. Bill Maher, who has a program on HBO and a well-known comedian,

kind of cultural analyst. He says this, Philip Morris just wanted your lungs. The App Store wants your soul. That's a pretty powerful quote by a guy who's just looking at what technology is doing, what the engineers behind that technology are trying to do. They want all of you. They're not bad people is just the product that they have designed is rooted in trying to keep you as engaged and possible. Now, if you want that, if you want to be the kind of person who spends, and Patrick said one and a half to three hours, I don't know who he's talking to. It's a lot more than that. Those are really low number. I thought these are people who are conscious. Yeah, really low numbers. If you want to spend four, five, six, seven, eight hours a day on your phone, then fair enough.

But the question is, have you thought through that? I heard one guy talk. about his kid who said to him, Dad, do you know what I wish my superpower was? And the dad said what? And the kid said, I wish I could talk to animals. Well, why do you want to talk to animals? Well, then I'd have somebody to talk to when you and you and mom are always on the phone. If you want to be the kind of parent who's always in their phone, then fair enough. We're just saying, maybe think through it and ask, what kind of life do I want to live? When I stand before God and have to give an answer to him, what kind of parent do I want to be? What kind of Christian? What kind of worker? What kind of friend? What kind of spouse do I want to be? So we're not saying phones are bad or technology is bad. We're just saying can we think about them in a more intentional way? I think Christians should be in the lead of movements that are resisting the attention economy. Not in this sense. I'm not talking about political activism. I'm talking about it in our personal lives. We should be in the forefront of those who are questioning, at least in our own lives, how we're using technology. We should be asking, am I serving my iPhone or is my iPhone serving me?

Am I serving Facebook or is Facebook serving me? Am I serving Instagram or is Instagram serving me? Am I serving my email? Is my email serving me? Am I serving my text messages serving me? And I think anybody with an ounce of honesty would probably admit. You know what? Sometimes I'm a slave to those things.

In fact, far more than I would like to admit. Because if my phone buzzes, I can't resist checking. When I am waiting in line, when I'm in the car, when I'm talking to my spouse, we're having a great conversation. I can't help but think, oh, I just want to check what's happening on Facebook. I just want to see what's happening on Instagram. How many of us are cheating on our spouse, not with a real person, but with our cell phone? That's what we're looking at before we go to bed.

That's what we're thinking about when we're talking to them. And my guess is if you talk to the average husband or wife, to the average parent, they would never say that's the kind of husband or wife I want to be. That's the kind of parent that I want to be. They'd say, no, that's not who I want to be at all. It's just who I've become. And I think it's who we've become because we haven't been reflective enough about how we're using technology. I think part of what we should think through when we think about how do I use my phone.

What apps do I let there be on my phone? How do I do that? We should do it based on our values. We should start with the simple question, what kind of person do I want to be? And let that be the thing that shapes how much time I spend on my phone. One good example of this comes from Amish community. communities. So if you're like me and you don't know a lot about the Amish, I kind of assume that they disavowed technology. They didn't use technology at all. And that's in reality far from the truth.

They actually use quite a bit of technology in their communities. You'll find incredibly high-tech milling technology, high-tech metalworking technology. So they're happy to use technology. But before they let any technology into their community, they ask a simple question, does this technology support our fundamental values of family and community. And if it doesn't, they say, okay, we're going to be better off without it. What if that's where we started, rather than just assuming I have to have this app or I have to do this thing on my phone, what if we just ask the question? Does this website, app, or service really support something that I deeply value?

And then a second question, is it the best way to support that value? If the answer to those questions is no, then get rid of it. your life is going to be better off with less. So let's go back to distraction and how our phone distracts us from the life that we want to live. And I think what we find is that there are two kinds of triggers that cause us to look at our phone. And one of those sets of triggers comes from inside of us. You might think of them as internal triggers. Those are along the lines of boredom or just that we had the tendency to dwell on bad stuff in our life.

And so what we find is that we look at our phone to escape those uncomfortable moments. We're bored, so what do we do? We look at our phone. We are disappointed with something and we're looking for a moment of escape. What do we do? Well, we look at our phone. And because we as human beings have a tendency to focus a little bit more on the negative things in life, it provides this great opportunity to always be looking at our phone as a way to escape

the moment or to find something to cheer us up. For me personally, the thing that probably is my biggest internal trigger is boredom. I just find that when I start getting bored, I've wired myself to think, not only I need to be entertained, but that the boredom itself is a problem that I have to escape. And so one of the ways to fight these internal triggers is to, as weird as it sounds, actually take note of them. I've gotten into a habit, whether it's on my phone, ironically, or on a piece of paper, just writing down, hey, what was the trigger?

What was making me want to get onto my phone to check my email or my text messages or ESPN or whatever it is? What was the trigger? I'll write it down and then I'll describe how it felt. This is what it felt like to be in this situation. And then I'll do something called surfing the urge. I'll say, okay, I'll wait 10 minutes and if I still want to get on my phone and check these things, then I'll go do it. And the amazing thing is, if I give it 10 minutes, the vast majority of the time, I don't want to get back onto my phone. I've moved past the thing that was urging me to use my phone.

So not only are there internal triggers, but there are also certain external triggers, and we're familiar with those. The notifications on our phone are sold to us as they're going to help us. In other words, you don't need to always look at your phone because your phone will notify you when something important comes in. And I find this shocking. 85% of people who get a phone never change or adjust the notifications, maybe hardly anything. of the settings. So that means that every time that they get an email, there's a little badge that pops up on the phone that says one, two, ten, however many emails you got. Every time you get a text message, there's the same kind of badge that appears on the screen, but also perhaps there's a

D or a vibration that goes with it. And then that same approach, that same thing happens, that same trigger, external trigger happens when they get a tweet, when they get a Facebook update. It's constantly saying, come look at me. So it's sold as, look, you don't need to look at your phone. We'll tell you when something happens, but it turns out something's always happening. And we become like Pavlov's dogs, where we continue to run to our phone even when there's really not anything of substance to look at. So it seems like if we're going to battle this temptation to live a distracted life, we're going to have to take our phone and take control over it. And there's a lot of different ways you can do that.

You can turn off your notifications. So there's no longer a badge that comes up on the screen, and it no longer vibrates or deans. You can put your phone on grayscale, which is easy enough to do. And what it does is kind of what it says. It just makes everything gray so that the colors don't jump out at you. Seriously, go and gray scale your phone. And the first thing that will happen to you is you will feel sick to your stomach. I can't make this up.

I've had my phone gray scaled when I showed people. They give me disgusted looks. And it's funny. I'm like, why is it such a visual response? And you know the answer? Your brain has already been trained to expect this rich color experience when you look at a phone. And when you don't get it, it says, ew, that's not what I wanted. I don't want anything to do with this.

Exactly. That's why I want my phone to do that because I don't want to be addicted to my phone that way. Even the phone just sitting out on a table where it's visible is another form of external distraction. I was eating lunch with a guy yesterday and he said that he is working hard to try to put his phone in his pocket, in a jacket, somewhere out of sight when he's having a conversation. Because the way he says it is that even while he's dialoguing with the person in front of him, his mind, when he can see that phone, his mind is wondering, what's happening, what emails am I getting? What am I missing out on? What information is coming across my phone that I need to get to?

and he says it's not like it's 50-50, but maybe 20% of his mind is on his phone, and he's unable to engage the business lunch he's in or the friend or a person in his family that he's talking with. Anybody who's talking to someone who, in the middle of the conversation, they're looking at their watch or they're looking at their phone, we all have the exact same internal reaction. It's annoying. It's not just annoying?

It's a little bit insulting. You're saying they're thinking, I mean, really, am I that boring and that unimportant that it's okay for you to start looking at your phone? and yet we don't think about the fact that not only we do that to other people, but that's exactly how they're feeling whenever we're talking to them. I think another thing to consider here is what I'll hear some people say is I'm a really great multitasker, so I can get distracted by my phone. I can leave the notifications on because I can pop right back in and out to what I was doing before. That is simply false. At least every study that's been done seems to say that that's false.

Most studies are showing that it takes us anywhere from six to 20 minutes once we've been distracted to get back into whatever we were doing before. So the cost of getting the text message ding or the email ding, that cost is real time in your life. It's real time when you're trying to work. It's real time when you're with your family. And you can't get it back. Unfortunately, I'm one of those people who think that I can multitask.

I know all the research like Patrick just said, says that no one can do it. But maybe you're like me and you think you are different. You're unique. You figured out how to do several things at one. time, maybe you think that the dings and the buzzes and the notifications don't affect you. If you are, I sympathize with you, but I have to come to this conclusion. Either I am this unicorn or maybe I'm just not seeing myself accurately and I'm believing something that's not quite true. I think some other lies that are easy to believe, or at least things I hear people

say in response to me whenever I'm encouraging them to rethink their relationship with their phone. One thing someone will say is they'll say, well, if I do that, my friendships are going to suffer or my relationship with my wife or my girlfriend or whatever it is, that's going to suffer. And the reason there is they say, look, if I'm not checking my text messages all the time, it's going to insult people because I don't respond right away. Or if I don't get onto Facebook or Instagram and like people's post or say, you know, your little baby looks so cute, they're going to be deeply offended. They're going to think I don't care about them and their life. And why I call this a lie is, first of all, I've tried myself to cut back some of this. And what I've actually discovered is if instead of getting onto Instagram and liking the friend's baby photo, my wife and I go visit and see the baby, which one of those two is going to go a lot further? Well, it's going to be us visiting and showing up and actually being in their life.

And if I can't do that, does it really matter to that person, whether or not I like it or I don't say anything? And the same thing goes from my text messages. I can leave a text message for a good amount of time and check them all at once later on. And does it insult my friends? for the most part, no, because that's just kind of how real life is. So some of these things that we just believe. The other one that I hear a lot is it has to do with email. We'll talk about email more in a second, but people will say, if I do this, my work is going to suffer. If I'm not constantly checking my email or my text or even social media, my job's going to suffer. And again,

I would just contend to try and experiment for a week. If you tried to, let's say, check your email once every hour and a half instead of constantly, just letting it ding whenever it comes up. and in between those hour and a half blocks, you focused hard on your work. You did the real work that you needed to get done. I think what you're going to find is that the productivity, the actual work that you're doing in that hour and a half time, the benefits of that far outweigh having a five-minute email response time. Now, I realize there's some people who might be the rare exceptions to that, but anyone

I've asked to do this challenge has discovered, yeah, that's actually pretty much the case. So maybe let's move from there and talk for a second about emails, because emails are something that I think are incredibly distracting. I tell us to my wife all the time. I think the thing that 100 years from now people are going to look back at us and say they were insane, they were crazy, is going to be emails. They're saying they spent so much time checking and responding and looking at emails. Didn't they realize how unproductive that really was? So to talk about emails for a second, I just want to maybe explore a few different ways that we can cut down how much time we spend on emails. So one of the best ways to get less emails is to send less emails.

before you send an email ask, is this better than walking down the hall and having a face-to-face conversation? Or is an email better than just picking up the phone? Because sometimes we go back and forth with email, we get confused, we don't understand someone's tone. And we could have just had a quick minute conversation and made a lot more progress than it took to send several emails back and forth. Another thing is Patrick was saying that email is kind of evil and we'll look back on it and think that it was a silly way to communicate. I'm pretty sure that reply all is from the devil, it is from the pit of hell. There's nothing worse than someone sending an email and then carbon copying all these people on it and hearing one or two at a time respond.

Almost always, it would be better to just BCC everybody. And that way if someone responds, only the sender gets it, but not every single other person has to be interrupted with it. So ask yourself, is this worth? interrupting someone's day over. Part of the principle here is loving your neighbor as yourself. Again, remember, every distraction I put into someone's life is going to cost them six to 20 minutes. That is real time, real life that you are saying. What I am saying to you demands that time. It's worth your time. And maybe it's just me, but I think that I have very few things that demand that

much time for most people. I try to be someone, and I've discovered you send less, like he said, you get less, who's doing that myself. I think it's a great way to treat others. Maybe the one biggest thing you can do to reduce emails, and this will actually apply, I think, to text messages as well, is trying to answer your emails and batches. So everybody's work is different. Some people say, I need to check my email at least once an hour. Other people, they'd say, I only need to check it once or twice a day. Just ask yourself, how often do you really need to check your email? And then decrease it a little bit, because you probably think you need to check it more than you really do. one of the best things you can do to stay focused during the day is to set time periods. Maybe it's

every hour, every two hours, where you'll get onto your email and you'll reply. And one of the things will happen is, first of all, you're wasting less time getting distracted on email. But second of all, your responses to those emails tend to be better because you're actually focused in on them. One of the things I've been guilty of in emails is precisely because it's kind of annoying, busy work. I just let the conversations keep going on and back and forth, back and forth. So when someone asks me something, I give them half of the information they need and can try to pass off the word to them. One of the best things we can do when we do those batch emails is actually giving someone all the information. Hey, you want to meet up? Here's five times I can meet up. I can limit the

amount of emails I get by doing that. I think in a similar fashion, we should think about how we can limit text messages in our lives. So this is going to sound crazy to the vast majority of the world. I leave my phone on Do Not Disturb basically the entire day. That explains why you don't respond to my text messages. This is enlightening. Now, you know. Now, I have it set up so that really important people can call me if they need me. So I've got my wife on there. She can call me if she needs me through Do Not Disturb. I've got my bosses on there so they can call me if they need me on Do Not Disturb. But otherwise, I check my text messages about every hour to an hour and a half. And I respond to them in batches. I cannot describe how much better my life has been. I cannot put words on. My life has been so much better waiting to read those text messages, not get distracted by them in the moment. And even, evaluate, is this really something I have to respond to? Because I found a lot of the text I get, really, they don't need anything from me at all. You've said something a couple different times now, Patrick, that I want to just build on, and that is responding in batches. So you said email,

let's respond in batches, wait for a couple hours or a few times a day, and then respond to all of them at once. Same now you're kind of saying for text messages minus a few important people. I think you could do the same thing in social media. Set aside some time. in your day to scroll through social media. I don't know. Is it lunchtime for you? Is it dinner? Wherever it is. Doesn't matter. Spend 20 minutes or however long you want and go through all the social media that you can fit into that time and like whatever photos you want and retweet whatever you want and post whatever you want, but you do it all within this predetermined amount of time that you've set aside for it. And it can be whatever you want. The point is not to judge a person.

for how they spend their time. The point is to say, think through, be intentional about how you want to spend your time, make sure that it's according to your values, and then keep something like social media or email or whatever it is within those predetermined boundaries that you've come up with. One of the best ways to do this, if you're anything like me, is to make pre-commitments. Pre-commitments are when you say, like Keith said, ahead of time, this is what I'm going to do. and then you set up limits so that you can't break your pre-commitment. So let's just take each example of social media. It's possible.

You do not have to be a tech know-it-all to be able to do this. It's possible to set up your phone so that it blocks an app after you use it for a certain amount of time, like let's say 30 minutes. I just don't have much self-control. Once I start using an app, I don't want to get off of it. The best thing I've done is setting time limits. And then when the time limit comes up, the app is blocked. I actually have a co-worker who has the pass code to take off that lock because if I had the

pass code, I would just take it off every single time. So find someone who you would actually be somewhat embarrassed to come back to again and again and again and say, hey, will you set the pass code for my screen time so that I can make sure I'm not on Facebook longer than 30 minutes a day so that I can make sure I'm not checking my emails on my phone at least more than 30 minutes a day? So I can make sure I'm not on my text messages longer than 30 minutes a day, whatever it is for you, if you make the pre-commitment and then you set up the structure, you're going to be forced to actually live out of your values. I think the pre-commitment thing is huge because in the moment,

we can't always trust our self-control. And so instead of trusting our motivation to do the right thing, we are saying ahead of time, here's what I want to get done and I'm going to set myself up to succeed. So one thing that I'm intrigued about but haven't done it yet, just to be honest, is to say, I'm going to come into the office and let's say I've got two hours of something I really want to focus on and then give my phone to someone else and tell them to hide it for those two hours. Or put my phone where it is completely out of reach. It's in my car. I leave it in my car and I come into the office and work for those two hours and then I can go out and get my phone. If my phone is sitting right next to me, I promise that I do not have the self-control or the willpower to ignore it.

That's true of any kind of distraction, though, not just my phone, trying to put myself in a position in an environment where I am unable to be distracted. And one of the things I think we have to think about as we're thinking about our phones is the patterns that we create with our phones, they run throughout our whole lives. So if I'm really distracted on my phone at work, it is a guarantee that you will be distracted on your phone at night. And maybe you've got kids and you want to have time with your kids and you lose it because you're distracted all day long. or maybe you don't have kids, but you say at the end of my life, the last thing I want to say is that I spent two hours every night wasting time on social media when I could have been reading a great book, exercising, developing a new skill, learning how to play an instrument. I don't know what it would be for you. But really, forget to the end of your life and someone

says, look, you've got about 16 hours in your waking day and you've got a choice. You can spend three to four of those hours looking at your phone every single day. or you could spend those three to four hours doing a myriad of other valuable things. Who in the world is going to pick staring at their phone? The reality is that's what all of us pick. And so again, this goes back to the values-based decision-making. What I've told myself, and this might sound crazy to other people, is if I'm spending over an hour on my phone per day, I have wasted time. And there's nothing I hate more personally than wasting time. You can ask my wife one time I slept in until 11 o'clock. When I woke up, I turned around and

punch the pillow as hard as I could and started yelling. So I've got problems, right? I don't want to waste my time, but I don't want to waste my life. That's all I don't want to waste my time. So just look, say, I've got 16 waking hours. How many of those hours, realistically, do I want to spend staring at a phone? And then make your decisions about what apps you're going to use, how much time you're going to spend based on that. Don't let the apps pick it for you. You don't serve the apps. Let the apps serve you. The only way that you can be distracted is to know how you planned on spending the time. So if I am trying to work on a sermon, I can get distracted by an interruption, someone stopping by my office. If I was going to spend time with my kids or my wife, then I can get distracted by some sports on television. But if I don't have any plan for how I'm going to spend my time, well, then I really can't get distracted. because there was nothing I was planning on doing. So to us, the issue is not technology.

The issue is distraction. But even more than that, the issue is let's live a life that counts, a life that matters, a life that when we stand before God and give an account, we won't say that we wasted that life, but we spent it. We spent it doing our work well. We spent it investing in good friendships. We spent it enjoying the world that God gave us. We spent it investing in our families and loving them.

We spent it investing in our communities. Maybe it's the PTA. Maybe it's big brothers, big sisters. It can be anything. But that's what we want to do is we want to stand before God and say, because of what you've done in our life, we have loved and served not only you God, but all the people who you've put us around,

our community that you put us in. What we don't want to do is stand before God and say that we send some really cool pictures on Snapchat or that we're up to date on all the Facebook gossip. That's what we don't want to say. So like Patrick said, use your time well. You're accountable to God for it. Don't get distracted by things of lesser importance.

So here's a closing challenge. In the next two days, find time to sit down by yourself and think about your values. Think about what you really want to spend your time doing. If you're married or even you've got a girlfriend or boyfriend, sit down with them or close friends, sit down with them and talk about it. Say, here's how I'm spending my time right now on my phone, and here's how I want to spend it. And then I would challenge you to spend the next month going through a digital declutter where you say, you know what, I'm going to get rid of everything that's distracting. I'm going to detox off of it for 30 days. And then I'm going to slowly, one by one,

reintroduce things. But I'm only going to reintroduce anything that actually adds something to my life. This is like the whole 30. It is. It's the digital whole 30. I only made it 15 days on my whole 30, but I'm hoping to go full 30. On the digital one or the food? The whole 30 one. The digital one's a different story. But ask yourself, is this actually going to add something to my life? Does this support my fundamental values? And is it really the best way to do it? One other related thing. Part of having a lot of digital distractions in your life is feeling busy all of the time. And so Keith and I, we've created a short 10-day email devotional. We've got a link to it in our show notes. You can sign up for it. online and you'll just get an email every day and those emails are going to be walking you through

how to fight against that sense of crazy busyness that we all have in our lives, how to practically take steps towards resting and resetting. And of course it's going to talk about things like digital distraction, but it's going to go a little more broad than that and help us think through our whole lives and how to create patterns of rest that will really rejuvenate us. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.