Confession time. I have a digital addiction—I am working on kicking the habit but I can only say in my defense, I am not alone. Well, I am alone, but more about that later. My addiction is to my phone—or more precisely the hundreds of messages and texts, emails and Apps vying for my attention. It is so bad, that even when there are no messages in the queue waiting for me I will go up to some news feed or magazine app and catch up on news I already know and articles I have already read rather than simply sit quietly and just think.
Does any of this sound familiar? I tried an experiment—well by accident, the other day. I left my phone at home and went the whole day at the office without once consulting it. I put on a good face—told myself I could do it—no problem. But I found myself turning to it—to check the weather, google a term, make a call and a dozen other things I took for granted. This stuff is seductive—it lures you in by making things easy, frictionless, by giving us powerful tools to do things we didn’t know we needed to do, and now cannot imagine doing without. Those texts and emails, they are so gratifying—and don’t get me started on my social media sites. They connect me—give me a sense of peripheral vision about what is going on around me, make me feel part of some great big loving family of friends, acquaintances and even some people I barely know. But here is the thing, they are right in front of me—I could call, text or go see most of these folks anytime—but I don’t for the most part. I just interact with them—or sometimes just stay aware of them through their posts and occasionally through their emails and texts.
Just what is going on here? Since you are by now familiar with my MO you know where I am headed. Here we are –human beings living and acting in the real world—able by dint of technology to reach out and connect with another person at almost any time, and increasingly we interact with an avatar—their message, their persona, their Facebook post. Little of this is in real time. In fact the only time it is in real time is when I call—an increasingly rare thing, and on a few other occasions. Let me describe two. One is transactional—I need something and because I live in a world of instant gratification, I need it now. Since you can almost never speak to anyone you call without first reaching their voice mail, you text or email—hoping to get them to respond, right now. As soon as my needs are met—back to texting or posting asynchronously.
The other time I want an instant connection –but not necessarily in person or by voice, is when I am conversing with someone I love. Then I hang on the reply and the wait seems interminable. But a text out of nowhere suddenly arriving on my phone—a message of endearment sends an electric pulse racing through me and instantly I respond wanting to keep the connection—wanting to build on it and grow it into –into their instant apparition by some divine trick. That’s the same phenomena that Internet Dating sites employ. If you’ve read my book, Life, Love, and Internet Dating you will remember that I wrote about how we become dependent on that connection with the one we love—sometimes even with people who are not real or not right for us—because we so badly want to feel loved.
That’s it, isn’t it? We all want to feel loved—feel we are in relationship with someone that loves us without condition, without judgement, that places us before all others. And sometimes—rarely indeed, we are so blessed as to find that person, the one person who is able to love that way. Most of the time, however, we just keep searching and we make do with a relationship that does not honor us and in which we are unable to honor another. It does not have to be that way but as humans it is so very hard for us to love generously, without expectations of reciprocity, without conditions.
In this world we would be fortunate indeed to find such a person and have them in our lives. But there is one being who is always standing just out of our peripheral vision ready and wanting to love us this way, God. Unfortunately, we often just ignore him—cannot see or feel his love, see or feel how he orders our lives and places people, and opportunities in front of us every day that we simply do not see for what they are. If we are very fortunate—meaning if we have passed through some trial, some adversity, and through it grown closer to God, we have caught a glimpse of him; seen how he came to us at our lowest and lifted us up—how he used our adversity to bring us closer to him. And if we are open to it we have seen him as he is—real and present in our lives—holding out his arms and welcoming us into his embrace—loving us exactly how we want to be loved—fully, completely, without condition. We need never be alone again.
We need never feel the need to pick up that phone and anxiously flip through our texts, check our FaceBook page or catch up on the news. We can go back to being at peace—the peace we once knew as little children, the peace we are longing for even now. We can leave our phones at home and the world will get on—just send us a text if anything important happens, we are having a moment with God.