31-Day Phone Challenge - Day 10

 

I don’t even want to address this topic. And I won’t say the word since I don’t want my blog flagged. But the statistics of evil online use in our society is appalling. And that includes Mennonites. Some of you have men in your life who have battled this addiction. But I’ve talked to women who are frustrated that sermons are always pointed to the men, because they too struggle with using sensual media, whether in images, movies, or books.

Satan tells us that we can indulge in sin in the privacy of our phone, and it won’t hurt anyone, but nothing is hidden from our all-knowing, omnipresent God. Someday everything done in secret will be revealed. Our browsing history is a permanent record before God unless we cleanse it by the blood of Christ.

James 5:16 gives us a battle plan. Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.

Ignoring sin will kill you, just as ignoring cancer or signs of a heart attack doesn’t make it go away, but only allows it to become worse.

Victory can be found in Christ if we confess, repent, and become accountable.

Today’s Challenge: Pray for courage to confront the areas of your life that need changed. Confess any sin God reveals, and then tell someone about it.

I tell my children that if anyone asks you to keep something a secret (not talking about birthday surprises) then that is the thing that you need to tell your parents. And the same is true for us adults. If Satan is encouraging you to hide something from others, that is the thing that you need to reveal in order to break sin’s grip on you. Begin to pray that God will give you a trusted person to be accountable to.

31-Day Phone Challenge - Day 9

 

Social media can bring a sense of inadequacy. With the “like” button, we can compulsively check our score – to see how we measure up to others.

Of course we are usually comparing our worse day with the carefully curated display of our friends’ lives. One friend sent me a photo of a pretty plant in her dining room, then zoomed out to show me the whole room, which was a disaster. That kind of honesty isn’t often posted on Instagram.

Many studies have shown that the use of social media brings a lower self esteem and higher rate of depression. Depression rates increase with the more time that is spent on social media, especially for teens.

2 Corinithians 10:12 says that those who compare themselves are not wise. Most of us can quote the verse, but how are we living it? Do we continue to visit sites that feed our struggle with comparison? Some of us struggle with jealousy more than others, and your envy trigger will likely be different from mine, but do we knowingly put ourselves into places that I know will breed discontentment?

I need to be honest and say “When I get on this site, I struggle with fear (or envy, or discontentment, or anger, or…)” and then proactively take steps to avoid those emotions. Maybe the first step is to admit it to a friend. Then be willing to delete apps, unsubscribe, or delete what is not building the fruit of the Spirit on your life.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. Galatians 5:22

Today’s Challenge: Start a thankfulness list. (And yes, this list can be on your phone.) You could even give yourself a challenge such as “I won’t get on Instagram until I’ve added to my thankfulness list.” Ask a friend to hold you accountable. At the end of the week, you can even check your phone tracker to see how many times you were on social media to see if you met your thankfulness goal.

In Atomic Habits, James Clear says that the best way to start a new habit is to bundle it with a habit you already have. So if you want to start a new habit, such as be more grateful, connect it to a habit you already have, for example, social media. If you stop and give praise to God every time you reach for your phone, your spirit will have a greater lift than the dopamine that social media can give.

31-Day Phone Challenge - Day 8

 

We can connect online, but we rarely have real conversations. Conversations need real voices with inflection and listening and context, even if they are sent by Facetime or a phone line.

A real relationship is two-way. You not only know them, but they know you.

I enjoy learning from people online—reading book reviews, trying recipes, and being inspired in my Christian walk– but those online personalities won’t point out inconsistency in my life or show up at my door with a meal when I am sick. They don’t know me. Only the bit of myself that I choose to show online.

Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend. Proverbs 27:17

Online relationships can be easier than the messy real-life relationships where people may have annoying habits and rub me the wrong way. On social media, I can choose who I interact with and just block or unfriend someone who I find annoying.

I’m grateful for my friends who use social media to say “When can we get together?” and then set a date and time instead of pretending that status updates will nourish our friendship.

We want community and we need it, and our phones can be a tool to connect us in good ways, but without deliberate attention, we won’t have the conversations that build community.

Today’s Challenge: Set a No Zone for your phone. Maybe “no phone at meals” or “no phone when I’m talking with a friend.” And we all know that we shouldn’t be on our phone while we are driving. You might need to get a little radical and hide it in your bedroom at dinner or lock it in the trunk when you are driving (if not using GPS). And at first it might make you feel a little twitchy to be away from your phone if you are used to having it in your pocket. But try it for a week before you give it up. You may find you love it and purposely lose your phone more often.

31-Day Phone Challenge - Day 7

 

If I asked you why you are using social media, you’ll probably say it is to connect with family and friends. That is a valid reason. I love the ease in communication with friends around the globe.

But we can be connected to hundreds of people on social media and still be lonely. Connection online doesn’t always result in community.

Gary Miller in Surviving the Tech Tsunami writes, “Just as our hunger for physical nourishment can be falsely satisfied, so can our relational appetite. That normal need for relationship begins to gnaw deep inside, and out comes our electronic device . . . We are falsely satisfying our inner need for healthy dialogue and relationship with virtual interaction—relational candy. Keeping up with friends online can create a false sense of intimacy and temporarily quench that inner desire for face-to-face interaction.”

God gave us a desire to belong, and He designed the Church to fill that need. But today many of us are using social media as a substitute for the local Church and real relationships in the Body of Christ.

For hundreds of years, human interaction consisted of the people that lived within walking distance—the neighbor you could talk to over the backyard fence or meet when walking to the village well.

Today I can find my “community” anywhere in the world. I can seek out those with the same hobbies, interests, beliefs, and dreams. If I have a passion of knitting scarves with llama motifs, I can probably find a community of llama-motif-scarf knitters. There are communities for special-needs children, scrapbookers, runners, and every other conceivable category.

This can be a blessing. I love the support networks of the online community, especially for believers who don’t live near a local church. But in seeking out those who are like me, I can lose the interaction with those who are different than me, maybe those of a different age or with different interests.

I can talk for hours with a sourdough-baking, book-loving, gardening, homeschool mom. But I learn a lot from my single nurse friend who has been battling Covid in a nursing home. Or the elderly, or urban-dwellers, or adoptive moms—those with life experiences that I’ve never had.

If I only surround myself with those who think and act just like me, I could get a warped view of the Body of Christ. And this problem is magnified online, where categories and interests easily separate us. I might not even realize that there are vast numbers of people with very different views because I’ve chosen my own bubble.

From Him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work. Ephesians 4:16 NIV

We need each other. The Body of Christ is incomplete without each of us working together. That fact should make us rejoice in the diversity and variety of women in our local church.

Today’s Challenge: Set a goal to have a real conversation (not texting) with a friend today (or this week.) Set a date and time to meet for coffee or Facetime or simply talk on the phone. And maybe even call or meet with someone outside your normal circle of friends, someone older or younger, someone with different interests and goals, who can broaden your view of the Body of Christ.

31-Day Phone Challenge - Day 6

 

The smart phone has been compared to the slot machine.

The slot machine was designed to encourage compulsive use and is considered the most addictive device ever invented.

Most of us wouldn’t dream of gambling, but the phone was designed to give us the same addictive hormone triggers as the slot machine. When I check my phone, I may find a fun email or a text from a friend. This reward gives a boost of dopamine – the happy hormone which reinforces the reward.

We are “addicted to our phones because we crave immediate approval and affirmation.” Tony Reinke in 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

The contrasting hormone to dopamine is cortisol, the stress hormone. Some psychologists claim that our phones promote anxiety because we worry that we are missing something.

Social media sites were purposely designed to be endless. You will never come to the end of Google. Or Instagram. Or Youtube. There are 500 hours of video uploaded onto Youtube every minute. Every minute! There is always another post, another link, another video. When we lay down our phones, we know that we will miss something.

With dopamine rewarding us with notifications and cortisol plaguing us every time we shut off our phones, no wonder we are glutting ourselves with phone time.

“The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.” Cal Newport in Digital Minimalism

Mark 4:18-19 describes the setting of our world today. “And these are they which are sown among thorns; such as hear the Word, and the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the Word, and it becometh unfruitful.”

Today’s challenge: Turn off most, if not all, notifications on your phone. You can always turn them back on if you find you need them, but rarely are social media notifications an emergency.

When my phone would ding with a WhatsApp message, all my children would rush to my phone. And, to be honest, I’d be tempted to stop what I was doing, too. Checking a short WhatsApp message not only interrupted my task, but often turned into twenty minutes on my phone. Turning off the notifications has significantly cut down phone distractions for me.

As with all these challenges, adjust them to fit your needs. Your life may require you to be more connected. Some apps can be set to allow only calls and notification from specific numbers. So if you want to allow calls from your husband and children, but not the rest of the world, you can.

31-Day Phone Challenge - Day 5

 

Smartphones haven’t been around for fifty years, so we don’t know the results of long-term use, but numerous books have been written on the affects of the internet on our attention spans, sleep cycles, memory, brain circuits, and more.

And none of it is good.

Catherine Price writes “If you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our minds, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, isolated, and overtired, if you wanted to weaken our memories and damage our capacity for focus and deep thought, if you wanted to reduce empathy, encourage self-absorption, and redraw the lines of social etiquette, you’d likely end up with a smart phone.” How To Break Up With Your Phone

In Irresistible, Adam Alter states that statistics show that the average user is on her phone almost three hours every day and picks up her phone almost 40 times daily.

If you do the math, that is 20 hours a week. You don’t want to know what that comes to in a month. Or a year. Or a lifetime.

When I installed a tracker on my phone, I was horrified that my phone use fit into those hourly norms. (Though I justified myself by saying that my children use my phone frequently.)

What could we be doing, what should we be doing, with all that time?

Social media has no cues for when you are full—when you have been online long enough. In fact, whistle blowers inside the industry, such as Tristan Harris, tell us that social media has been deliberately designed to make you crave more, to keep you from being ever satisfied.

The more time you spend on social media, the more you click and comment and share, the more money they make. Facebook, which also owns Instagram and Whatsapp, is worth hundreds of billions of dollars—made from selling our attention to advertisers.

Several thousand years ago, the writer of Proverbs wrote that human eyes are never satisfied. (Proverbs 27:20) In contrast, Psalms proclaims that those that seek God and praise Him are satisfied. (Psalm 22:26, 36:8, 63:5, 65:4)

Satisfaction won’t be found in social media, but it can be found in God.

Today’s Challenge: If you installed a phone tracker a few days ago, check the results. Are you surprised? What apps are you spending the most time on? (If it is your Bible app, you don’t have anything to worry about.) Do you wish you were spending your time in a different way?

31-Day Phone Challenge - Day 4

 

As daughters of God, we want to love the Lord with all our heart soul, mind and strength. But, would it be too strong to state that the default setting on our phones is to draw our hearts away from God?

Colossians 3:1-2 says, “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.”

Our phones are a tool. But a tool like a knife, though it can do harm, is not programmed to do evil. You don’t fear that, as you are chopping carrots for dinner, your paring knife will suddenly attack you.

Phones are different. Yes, you can choose to control your phone and do good with your phone, but your phone has been intentionally designed to prompt addictive behavior. It has been manipulated to be a conduit of lies against God and source of evil entertainment to your home.

It is easy for me to justify myself. I’m not tempted by porn, or gaming, or movies. There is so much good on my phone—podcasts, books, worship music, messages from godly friends. But yet, the good can distract from the best.

“It is difficult to serve God with our heart, soul, strength and mind when we are diverted and distracted and multi-tasking everything.” - Douglass Groothuis

Today’s Challenge: Ask yourself, What do I love about current technology? What do I not love? What changes do I notice in myself when I spend a lot of time on my phone? What changes would improve my relationship with my phone?