Tech Wise

 As technology has filled our lives with more and more easy everywhere, we do less and less of the two things human beings were made to do.

We are supposed to work, and we are supposed to rest. This pattern is fundamental to human flourishing, and to the flourishing of the whole world that depends on our care, but it has been disrupted and distorted by human greed and sloth. Instead of work and rest, we have ended up with toil and leisure. And strangely enough, technology, which promised to make work easier and rest more enjoyable, often has exactly the opposite effect.

If toil is fruitless labor, think of leisure as fruitless escape from labor. It’s a kind of rest that doesn’t really restore our souls, doesn’t restore our relationships with others or God. And crucially, it is the kind of rest that doesn’t give others the chance to rest. Leisure is purchased from other people who have to work to provide us our experiences of entertainment and rejuvenation.

Most of us can’t do much to change the nature of our work—or toil. But there is one thing most of us can do—and all of us are meant to do. It is to rediscover rest: real rest, in harmony with one another, our Creator, and all of creation. The biblical word for this kind of rest is Sabbath. Alas, of all the commandments, the Sabbath command may be the most persistently and casually broken.

But there is a silver lining in the way technology has clouded our lives with nonstop toil and leisure—it gives us an amazingly simple way to bring everything to a beautiful halt. We can turn our devices off.

Close the laptop. Slide the little onscreen button on your phone to the right and watch its screen go not just blank but black. Suddenly, with the flick of a few switches, you have left the world of technology entirely behind.

Now, consider your options. The wide world is outside your door. Maybe it’s time for a walk, a run, a visit to the park or the playground. There are books, some of them full of stories. Or there is the kitchen—maybe today is the day not just for one parent to rush nutrition to the table but to make something together, fresh bread or cookies or a roast or soup,that takes time and is actually rewarding to prepare. 

Now, whatever the nature of your work during the week, you’ll be doing something both demanding and rewarding, restful and rejuvenating—something adults can enjoy and children can admire and aspire to learn. This is meant to be—commanded to be—our life, one day a week and more. A life of abundance, gratitude, rest, and quiet. It will only happen if we choose it, but if we choose it, the experience of our family and many friends has been that God blesses it.

I suggest a simple, minimal pattern of Sabbath: we choose to turn our devices off not just one day every week but also one hour (or more) every day and one week (or more) every year.

Build into every single day an hour, for everyone in the household, free from devices. For many of us, this will most naturally be the dinner hour.  For families with small children, the better hour may be the hour just before bedtime, where baths and stories and cuddling can happen without digital distraction.

At the other end of the time scale, there are very few better gifts we could give ourselves and our families than an entire week—at the very minimum—free of devices. Our family has had the great privilege of being able to take two solid weeks of vacation each summer while our children were growing up. On the Friday before that vacation, I clean out my email inbox, set up a filter that will send every single message straight to an archive, and activate a “vacation message” with the stark subject line, “Unfortunately I will never read your email.”

For two solid weeks, my inbox stays completely empty. 

The days that follow are full—full of rest rather than work. We fill them with biking and hiking and grilling and reading and napping.  When I return after two weeks and deactivate the filter, my empty inbox quickly begins to fill again. But I have had two weeks of rest. Somehow the work ahead, and the year ahead, seems more like gift and less like toil than it did before my digital Sabbath.

In this area, as in all of life, the path toward real freedom is to embrace disciplines. And that is what the practice of Sabbath, whether on a daily, weekly, or yearly basis, can be. The beautiful, indeed amazing, thing about all disciplines is that they serve as both diagnosis and cure for what is missing in our lives. They both help us recognize the exact nature of our disease and, at the very same time, begin to heal us from our disease.

Fortunately, our devices still have an off switch. Once we have made the choice to give our devices a rest, we are far more likely to live with them in restful ways the rest of the time table.

So one hour a day, one day a week, one week a year—set it all aside.