I had to delete them all

I’ve been praying a lot more lately.  If that seems weird to read, well…I also admit that it is a little weird to type.  But the truth is, I’ve been talking with God a lot more in the past few months than in previous seasons.

If you’re wondering “why”, I can’t put my finger on just one thing – it’s more a list of influences, rather than a single event.  There’s no major tragedy happening (although that’s what tends to be the thing to push us to pray more).  Prayer has been the topic of two different sermon series at our church in the last six months, and the weekly Men’s Zoom call I participate in has been going through the book, Lead with Prayer.  I’ve also been using the morning prayers on the app Lectio365 as a launching pad to get my mind right before I pray.  But you know what draws me back to praying each morning and throughout the day, more than anything else?  I’m enjoying the time spent talking and listening to God.  That’s it.  When you have good conversation with someone, you naturally want to go back and converse some more.

Early one February morning before work that day, the house was quiet and I was sitting in my recliner with my eyes closed.  I had finished listening to and meditating along with the morning Lectio365 prayer, and I had just started to share with God what was on my mind.  I don’t remember exactly what I was praying about, but I was quickly interrupted with an impression/voice/idea from God.  I say “impression/voice/idea from God” because it wasn’t an audible voice in the room, but it was also not my voice – I know what I sound like when I talk/think internally, and this was not that.  This impression/voice/idea was very clear: You need to delete all the games off your phone.

I dismissed that thought and tried to continue on with what I was praying about, but the impression/voice/idea came back again, and more insistent this time: You need to delete all the games off your phone.  I argued back, even though I knew I didn’t have a good argument not to…I just didn’t want to.  The eight games on my phone were puzzle games, a hearts card game, and one hunting game.  Most of them I didn’t play often, a couple of them I’d play throughout the day when a moment of waiting or boredom hit.  They were a safety net when I didn’t want to think.  While playing them didn’t seem like that big of a deal, if you totaled up my game usage for the week, those random minutes here and there added up to about 1-1.5 hours per day.  So, after arguing with God for what seemed like forever, I slowly deleted them, one-by-one.

I’d like to tell you that I felt automatically free and within days became the most creative I’ve ever been in my life – but that’s not what happened.  That first week, there were numerous times I grabbed my phone, then I would stare at the screen wondering, “What exactly am I trying to do?”  I was getting a crash course of just how much I had outsourced my attention throughout the day. 

As the detoxing continued, the toughest time of day was later in the evenings, when my brain was too tired to think through most of my preferred hobbies (reading, writing, etc.) but I didn’t want to go to bed yet…what am I doing if I’m not staring at my phone?  This was especially hard at the two-week mark, that evening I wanted to do nothing more than download a game and just play the time away before bed.  However, what helped me get past that urge was the Bible app’s verse of the day.  It was part of something Paul said to his friends in Ephesus:

Acts 20:24
But I consider my life of no value to myself; my purpose is to finish my course and the ministry I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of God’s grace.

That verse really challenged me – I can’t reconcile playing app games with Paul’s focused understanding of his life and mission.  Let me be clear: apps and games for enjoyment aren’t sin.  However, as these were stealing my attention, they had also become an escape mechanism.  As such, they were pulling me away from what God had already called me to do.

This realization brought another Scripture to mind:

Hebrews 12:1-2
…let us lay aside every hindrance and the sin that so easily ensnares us.  Let us run with endurance the race that lies before us, keeping our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

I love how the author of Hebrews distinguishes between our life experiences.  We encounter both hindrances and sins – and both of them can easily ensnare us.  The games I was playing weren’t sinful, but they were a hindrance.  They were holding back my attention from where my feet were in that particular moment.  And as I am now over a month past removing them off my phone, I’m beginning to think that the apps were also a hindrance to preparing me for whatever mission God has next for me.

So, I have to ask – Does my story resonate?  Is there something in your life that isn’t necessarily “bad”, but has become a hindrance to living out who you are as a son or daughter of God?  Is there something in your life that could keep you from taking on that next opportunity to partner with God?

It’s time to lay that aside.

Keep Pressing,
Ken

Einstein, AA, and my sour mood

I was in a real sour mood last Tuesday night.  I wasn’t happy about anything.  I was tired of everything.  The thought of anything that I had typically taken enjoyment from…honestly sounded stupid and/or disgusting.  I even became mad at myself for feeling this way – because I knew (even if I didn’t want to admit it) that I had no good reason to be like this.

Nothing had necessarily “gone wrong” throughout the day, either.  Work was just normal stuff.  I hadn’t been in an argument with my wife or anyone else.  But the longer the evening went on, the darker my attitude went.  The bugger was that I had planned on writing a blog post that evening…and I was definitely not in the proper headspace to do that!  So, I did what most of us would do in this situation: I retreated to scrolling on my phone.

An hour later, I wasn’t feeling any better, and I was now cranky about being on my phone.  And then, it hit me.  I realized what was a big contributor to my mental bleakness.  I wasn’t fond of the conclusion, either, because it came with the recognition that my sour mood wasn’t really a one-off.  I’d been on this path on other recent nights, just that this night was the most sour I had felt lately.

The problem was the amount of time I was spending on my phone.  There’s a lot in the world to try and “keep up with”, but it’s impossible to do so.  There’s the normal rounds of news, social media, and sports, but there’s also a recent natural disaster in my state of North Carolina.  My family and I are fine, but starting about 1.5 hours west of us, “catastrophic” doesn’t even begin to describe what Hurricane Helene has caused.

So yeah, I’ve been on my phone a lot.  Scrolling, watching, listening…lather, rinse, repeat.  The problem is that all the things we use our phones for (especially social media) causes dopamine hit, after hit, after hit.  Once your brain gets used to it, all it wants is more.  Being overstimulated with dopamine can lead to addictive behaviors as the brain seeks to maintain that dopamine high…and over time, this can result in a decreased interest in other activities, including ones that were previously enjoyable.  There are tons of studies that prove out what I’ve described.

So, being in a sour mood and then hiding in my phone was actually the worst thing I could have done at that moment.  Kinda like putting a drunk alcoholic in a bar and telling him to sober up while he’s there.

While often attributed to Albert Einstein, the following quote actually first popped on the scene in the early 1980s within addiction recovery circles, specifically Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I knew that if I wanted to change my output (my sour evening mood), then I gotta change my input.  I can’t expect to keep doing what I’m doing and think that somehow everything will get better on its own.

So, I put me and my sour mood to bed, with plans to make better choices on Wednesday.  Fortunately for me, my church had its monthly serving opportunity with Feeding Lisa’s Kids, a non-profit that provides food on a monthly basis to food-insecure families in the High Point area.  I really didn’t want to go, but made myself anyway.  I purposely chose the music I listened to on the way there and back – David Crowder.  I kept my phone out of reach during work and kept its use to a minimum in the evening.  What I was trying to do was follow the advice Paul gave to the believers in Colossae:

Colossians 3:2
Set your mind on things above, not on earthly things.

Gotta remove the clutter to focus on the most important things.  The dopamine-driven noise isn’t going to help me see clearly.  I’ve already experienced the cloudy-minded sour mood it leaves me with.  Wednesday has been better, mentally – but it’s not like you can fix a dopamine addiction in one day, either.  This will require repeated choices over many days to build habits that don’t drive me down that path.

I’m also going to follow a piece of advice my mentor Joe gave me years ago, which I’ll pass on to you:

Let God’s Word be the first thing you read in the morning and the last thing you read before you go to sleep.

Before any other inputs in the morning – the news headlines, your email, social media, etc. – allow God to speak into your day.  And then, just before you slip into bed, go to God’s Word and read a chapter from the New Testament.  Give your mind something godly to ponder while you sleep.

I’ve followed this advice (imperfectly) for a long while, but going forward, I will make the choices to do it daily and change my inputs.  I know my struggle isn’t unique to me, there are too many studies and too much data proving that we’re all in various stages of dopamine addiction.  But if you want out of it, you gotta change your inputs.

So set your mind on things above, not on earthly things.

Keep Pressing,
Ken