Less Phone, More Jesus
Let me make a confession: During the sermon last Sunday, I got distracted on my phone.
In my defence, I was distracted by applying something from the sermon, so I think I should be excused!
If you missed it, last Sunday we heard from Adam on ‘Cultivating Healthy Emotions’—how we can establish spiritual habits which lead to a healthy emotional life.
The habit which stood out to me was the second one: “Go Outside”. Or more specifically, a statistic that Adam mentioned related to that habit, namely, that on average we spend 6 hours and 42 minutes online every day, half of that on our phones. I’ve linked the article below if you want to have a read.
As Adam mentioned, this is significant because digital technology overuse can have significant negative impacts. Just Google ‘digital overuse health impacts’ for a host of articles, I’ve linked one reputable article below as well.
I thought that this statistic didn’t sound quite right, and that is how I got distracted—I went looking through my phone’s settings to see if it could tell me my average daily usage. Now, not only could it tell me what my daily usage is, it also shows me a detailed breakdown of what apps I used and when. It was a bit confronting!
You can find out your usage quite easily in your settings. If you have an Android look for “Digital Wellbeing” in the Settings app, or if you have Apple, it is under “Screen Time”. For both, there are a range of settings available to help you keep track of how much time you spend on your phone, so you can create a more healthy digital schedule.
You could set yourself a range of goals depending on what you find there, but I’ve got two.
The first is to cut down my total social media time to 1 hour a day. That might seem like a huge amount to you, but it is a good goal for me! Social media is a great tool for communication and organising, but it is very easy to get distracted by scrolling down the feed.
The second is to get my Bible time in the top 5 most used apps each day (I’m counting the time that I spend reading my physical Bible). I want God’s Word to have a bigger share of my time than memes do (even if they are Christian memes, they just aren’t the same).
What can you do to get in the habit of putting down your phone, going outside, and focusing on God? I would love to hear what ideas you are putting into practice!
Look forward to seeing you on Sunday or through the week!
In Christ,
Nathanael
https://thenextweb.com/tech/2019/01/31/study-shows-were-spending-an-insane-amount-of-time-online/
