Thursday 7 July 2016

Listening for the still, small voice.....is there an ap for that?

Alan Jacobs has written a great article on Christian habits of the mind in an age of constant distraction due to technologies that allow us to be always "connected".  When we are constantly connected to each other, to our audience or community of social-media friends, we can seldom experience the stillness, the quiet and the healthy alone times that allow us to search our hearts or to quietly seek, speak with or hear from God.  Often our connectedness on social media creates an idolatrous technological omnipresence that masks or scrambles our ability to commune throughout the day with the truly omnipresent God.  And the idolatry of constantly being connected on social media through our manifold devices is joined by or enables another form of idolatry, indeed a far worse one:  self-validation.  Instead of looking to God and what he says for our worth, our security, our value, we find our self-image and self-worth in the fact that we are constantly connected to other people.  Many people never want to be in a place where they are alone with their thoughts.  Many people never want to find themselves in a position where the only person they are connected with is their creator. 
Our "ecosystem of interruption technologies" affects our spiritual and moral lives in every aspect. By our immersion in that ecosystem we are radically impeded from achieving a "right understanding of ourselves" and of God's disposition toward us. We will not understand ourselves as sinners, or as people made in God's image, or as people spiritually endangered by wandering far from God, or as people made to live in communion with God, or as people whom God has come to a far country in order to seek and to save, if we cannot cease for a few moments from an endless procession of stimuli that shock us out of thought.
You can read the entire excellent article here.



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