Field Notes From Real Life: Week 3
This week I became aware of something. Not only was the phone wasting my time and selling my attention to the highest bidder but it was acting as an addiction in a way I had not realized. Like many other addictions, social media was numbing me.
Over the past few years I’ve felt emotionally flat. A stoic baseline that was neither joyful or sad. I blamed this on a decrease of hormones since menopause or just age in general. If I noticed any emotion at all it was a general sense of fear and anxiety. A few months ago I asked AI if this was normal for people my age. It said it was but I went to the doctor anyway, got some hormone therapy, and after a few months I noticed not much had changed.
This week I became aware that some of the anxiety I had been feeling lifted. There were moments of joy. And one particular moment where a deep sadness and simultaneous joy sprang up accompanied by tears and a feeling of hope and lightness of being.
Saturday morning as soon as I finished Mere Chrisitanity I picked up the copy of C.S. Lewis’ The Weight of Glory and read the introduction. I sobbed all the way through as Walter Hooper who was Lewis’ secretary the last few months of his life recounted events and described the great man. Lewis is a personal hero and what I consider a literary friend and mentor.
My heart was broken in a million pieces while simultaneously being filled with a joyful aspiration. On the heels of Mere Christianity where we see Lewis be so open and real with us, the real life descriptions of him in hardship toward the end of his time on earth was more than I could take. His humility, modesty about his enormous success, and his genuine desire to imitate Christ made me appalled at how little I see these qualities in myself. I expected this month away from digital life to be full of deep reading and writing but I did not expect that God had any deep work he was trying to get done in me, but here we are.
This numbing effect of social media, which as I’ve pointed out before has us skim over the worst human atrocities, an ad for a bathing suit with pockets, heartbreaking tragedy, and a better sourdough recipe in a matter of seconds, may be the biggest danger.
Hopefully you are doing better than I have. In 2020 screen time went into overdrive and some of us never looked back. There are now all kinds of studies and surveys about what all this time online is doing to our brains. You can find them everywhere but the short list of what is happening is that we are becoming more anxious, forgetful, and dumber.
Go us.
I’ll be glad to serve as your case study, but I suspect we all know this from our own personal experience.
The time to think and ponder also brought me around to the anxiety of modern life. Our worst fears and worries often plague our minds like relentless mosquitoes keeping us from peace. In Mere Christianity God used Lewis to call me out by pointing out that worry and anxiety are wrong per the entire New Testament.
In case you don’t know, the Christian life isn’t about learning something no one ever discovered before or having some new revelation. It’s about being reminded or reminding ourselves of the divine story and ancient truth. As I heard one local pastor put it we don’t need anything new. We need to preach the Gospel to our own hearts.
I had to come to grips with the fact that letting my imagination about the future run away with me to terrible places was a direct affront to God. It was telling him I didn’t trust him with the future. After all he’s done for me, below the surface I didn’t really trust him to have a plan for the rest of the way. Well, not a plan that I would like anyway. We do so want to make the plan and have him approve it, don’t we?
This week wasn’t so much about putting my phone down and living a real life but more about reclaiming depth. Leaving the turbulent shore and diving into the cool still places of the soul where God had been waiting.
Dear friend this isn’t a sermon for you, for likely you are much farther along than I am but only the field notes from week 3.