Tim and I live in an apartment in Historic Franklin, Tennessee.
If I had to guess, there are probably 300 units in our development. 600 people, give or take. When I pull in to the driveway, I pass a few buildings. When I take our puppy on walks, I pass even more. Each apartment (or townhouse) is built exactly the same.
Same windows.
Same curtains.
Same sliding glass door.
Because of the way the living room is laid out, everyone’s TVs is cornered in between a wall and the patio door.
Rectangles glow out of living room after living room after living room. Grids of LEDs and plasmas and flickering pixels illuminate every unit, including my own.*
(*under the glow of twinkle lights on the patio, of course.)
There are two people in my house. Six apple products. One TV.
Screens, screens, screens.
How long have TVs been around? Sixty years? Seventy? Smart phones. Six? Seven?
In between episodes of Friday Night Lights (yes, I’m bringing that back up again), my eyes go from the big screen in the corner to the little screen on the ottoman. They move from Coach Taylor to Candy Crush.
Our puppy whines. Even she knows a screen subtracts from the attention we give her. When I pick up my phone, she whimpers. Every. Time.
***
I had the flu, or pneumonia, or both, for three weeks this month. I am still fighting off lingering symptoms of fatigue and aches and coughing. For one of those three weeks, I was too tired or medicated to look at any screen.
My mind raced and crossed the finish line in rural America. Rural churches. Churches in the places like where I grew up in west Texas; where it’s so remote you hit SCAN on the radio and it doesn’t stop because there are no stations. Where, if you have a cell phone now, it bounces between an American and a Mexican carrier. I think of rural churches I’ve heard of in Ohio.
Or I think of my friend who pastors a small church in South Dakota. No time for Facebook. Her days are full of funerals and hospital visits.
And I wonder…
Is distraction one of Satan’s biggest tools?
Are these screens we use to relax and to communicate pulling us away from doing the hard work of reaching out, flesh to flesh, to people who haven’t even heard of the saving grace of Jesus?
I realize there are always distractions; if it’s not a screen it’s something else. But night after night these glowing grids of screens haunt me with their soft light.
***
It’s a long story with a lot of complexities, far too long to type here (maybe I’ll tell you over coffee one day?), but my dad is in one of these rural towns. It’s in between two state highways in the barren flat land of the west Texas plains. You’d pass through it on Dry Hollow Road, if that paints any picture for you.
Population? 200 or so. Murders in the last three years? Two, including the original pastor of the church where my dad presently shepherds.
20 people or so attend his church on Sundays, maybe five to ten youth and a smattering of children. People hunger: physically and spiritually. Build it and they will come? In his case, feed them and they will come.
Honestly? It’s difficult for me to see multi-million dollar building campaigns for churches in middle-class suburbia. But I get it. I sometimes go to one of these churches and almost have panic attacks because it’s so crowded. They need more space. They really do.
But then I look at my dad’s church. It needs air conditioning so people don’t have heat strokes in service in the middle of a dry Texas summer. It needs the cracked wall fixed so insects/rodents/snakes/rain/freak snow storms don’t come in.
These are all needs – I don’t want to present it otherwise.
But some needs go forgotten.
Some needs are lost each time I log in to Twitter.
My eyes get turned back on me when I find my triggers of insecurity and envy after checking Instagram.
I get so mesmerized by my screens, by not getting the things I think I deserve, by my misplaced identity that I can’t see anyone else.
I’m distracted. And I think it’s hurting me.
But more importantly, I think it’s hurting the world.