Think

I made two changes to my phone that have both given me a sense of satisfaction.  The first was to follow @bofm365 on Instagram.  Now I know that when I check Insta in the morning, I have to read the prescribed scriptures right then.  It forces me to think a little bit before I scroll through all those fun, delightful pictures that I love so much.  And at the end of it, I've accomplished something.

The other small change I made was to throw my Facebook app in the trash and replace it with a Kindle app.  Now, whenever I have a few minutes, I click over to the book I'm reading instead of catching up on Facebook.  I haven't missed FB at all, and when I do check it occasionally, I find it more and more banal, the more I get used to its absence in my life.  And I've read my book club book for next month already.  So win-win.

My point isn't that technology is bad.  On the contrary, I think we all have to figure out how to harness it for our own purposes.  My phone does so many things, I would be completely handicapped without it.  That's not a bad thing.  It makes my life easier, it keeps me in touch with friends more successfully, it has all kinds of information that I need, I can swipe credit cards on it at the shop, I can take and edit pictures, and it makes life more fun.  Today in church, Ruby and I turned on my metronome app to see what tempo the song was going.  Predictably, it was dragging compared to the recommended tempo.  Usually, that drives me crazy, but today I had something interesting to do during the dirge, instead of mentally checking out.

Everyone has seen the recent "I'm getting a divorce in 2014" article that's going around, referencing the relationship between a guy and his phone.  I'm not "getting a divorce" from my phone, primarily because I recognize it NOT as something I have a relationship with, but as a tool I use to promote my relationships.  I'm not getting a divorce from my car, either, even though I spend inordinate amounts of time with it.  It is a vehicle that facilitates my lifestyle.  I'm not getting a divorce from the computer that lives in our kitchen, helps kids with homework, enables my hobby of writing and is available for knowledge acquisition 24-7, much like my parents' encyclopedias were during my youth.  That would be silly as silly as my parents tossing out their 24 volumes of Encyclopaedia Brittanica for fear of referencing them too much.

So let's no anthropomorphize our devices to the point that we feel we need time away from them.  If we did that, what would we do at red lights?