The Deacon Beacon - October 2015

My friend Ernie told me one day he going to find out just who had who in his family. Conjuring up a plan, he explained it to his wife, Meg, who told him he was probably crazy, but agreed to go along with it anyway.

Early the next day, his daughter Alice came to the breakfast table and asked if anyone had seen her iPhone.

“I have it,” Ernie said.

“Thanks, Dad,” Alice said, “Just toss it into my bag, would you?”

“No,” Ernie replied.

“What?” Alice asked, stopping in her tracks. “Don’t be goofy, Dad. Just do it, please, I need to catch the bus.”

“Your mother and I have decided the family needs a digital fast,” Ernie explained, as their son Tommy came downstairs with the same question as his sister.

“How are we supposed to stay in touch with anyone?” Tommy asked, astonished.

“Talk to them in person,” Ernie suggested.

“I’ve never heard of anything so stupid,” Alice fumed, squinting at Ernie. “I bet you get to keep your phone, don’t you?”

“No,” Ernie said, “Your mother and I gave our phones to Deacon Tim, along with yours. He’s going to hold on to them for a week; we’re going on a digital fast.”

That didn’t go over well at all, and the dialog that followed is not suitable for repetition in a sacred place, so let’s just say Tommy and Alice were furious. They went off to school in a murderous mood, arguing about whether it was all their dads idea or mine.

Meg came in from walking the dog after they’d left, as planned.

“How’d it go?” she asked Ernie.

“Pretty much the way we expected,” Ernie said. “Let’s see what happens next.”

“I really do want to check my Facebook, Ernie” Meg said. “I don't want to miss anything important.”

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” Ernie said firmly and Meg reluctantly agreed.

The kids came home from school that day to find the computers and iPads in the family room and empty shelves where the TVs used to be.

“You can use them for homework, but that’s it,” Ernie and Meg explained. “We’ll be here to make sure that’s all you do.”

The week wore on, and on Saturday I came by with the phones. I have rarely been greeted with such ambiguous enthusiasm. Happily, Ernie backed me up when I told Meg and the kids that it was all Ernie's idea.

“What was it like?” I asked the family as we shared a cup of coffee and some cookies.

 Tommy spoke first. “I felt like I didn’t have my shoes on, the first day” he said. “My friends wondered why I didn’t know about things. They looked at me strangely, like I had a disease or something.”

“Me, too,” Alice said, “I felt like I was being punished for something I didn’t do."

My girlfriends at the gym thought it was strange at first,” Meg said, “but then more than one admitted that they wished they weren’t tethered to their phones like dogs on a leash. Most of them agreed that the phones had them – they didn’t have the phones. One of them got angry though, and told me I was married to a Neanderthal,” Meg said, turning to Ernie with an affectionate grin.

“My boss was not amused,” Ernie admitted. “He told me to go find some other way to prove how holy I was to everyone.”

“Anything else?” I asked, chewing a cookie. The family pondered that request for a moment.

“I think somehow I got to find out who my true friends were,” Tommy said after a bit. “I think they were the ones who took time to spend time with me in person. The rest kind of blew me off. I wondered whether they had ever been real friends at all.”

“Same with me,” Alice said. “At first I was anxious and upset, but then I got used to being around just a few of my best friends: you know, the compassionate ones. They told me everything I needed to know to get by. When we talked face-to-face we really connected deeply."

"I was surprised how shallow some of my friendships had become. At first I was sad because I didn’t have my phone, but at the end of the week I was sad about something else – something I’d lost, actually given up voluntarily. My phone had me. I didn’t have the phone, and it had taken me to a dark superficial place where nothing serious ever came up. I felt so real sometimes during the week, and even found myself thinking about God. Just getting a little distance between me and the phone let me see what a big distraction it can become, if I let it.”

The family nodded in agreement, each in turn telling me in their own words that pretty much anything that distracted them from awareness of living in the presence of God was probably not a good thing.

Ernie tells me everyone has their phones again now and uses them freely, but not the way they had before. “It’s just a tool we can take or leave now,” Ernie said. “We have our phones now – they don’t have us. We’re learning to see our other possessions that way, too.”

Two thousand years on, the lure of possessions remains with us, even though their appearances may have changed. Not everyone needs to go on a digital diet, but the gospel challenges us as it has challenged millions of people for thousands of years to put some distance between ourselves and any possessions that possess us, from anything that distracts us from an intimate relationship with God, any enslavement that prevents us from doing what we must do to inherit eternal life.