Hint: Christians are meant to live in “sympathetic vibration” with the unhurried rhythms of the Holy Spirit, like singers in harmony.

OK, OK, I finally did it. I canceled my decades-long Wall Street Journal subscription. I have also resolutely parted ways with YouTube (except for providing music videos accompanying these essays). 

The Journal had to go because it chewed up countless chunks of time that I should otherwise have been spending in God’s Word.

YouTube needed to be ditched because it was shortening my attention span down to a few seconds per subject, while addicting me to the dread “scroll on” impulse to go to the next inane topic.

Both had become enemies of my spiritual growth. Good riddance!

Time is the only trading card we’ve got.

When we work for a company for a salary or volunteer at our local church, we are offering our precious, fleeting time for someone else to use.

But when our time runs out, it is not renewable. So, why would we waste it on anything that won’t contribute to our eternal welfare?

While technology has delivered amazing benefits to society, it has also diverted our attention spans away from things that really matter.

Too often, we find ourselves at the “pointy” end of an informational cattle-prod, filling our minds with gobs of data that we would be better off being without.

Think it doesn’t matter? In his May 8 Wall Street Journal commentary, “Habits for Humanity in the Age of AI” (I know, how ironic in light of what I just said), former Sen. Ben Sasse writes, “Shorter attention spans are killing our imagination. Before our kids even learn the alphabet, we hand them tablets, and we know from neurological imagery that it is rotting their brains.”

He adds,:“We live in the richest time and place in human history. Yet today’s young people are the first generation since we’ve had polling that has thought the future is going to be worse than the past.”

Finally, Sasse concludes, “Character, whether of an individual or of a nation, is molded by habits and by time. This republic requires men and women to do long-form deliberation, serious thinking, honest humility and daily striving.

“What good is it to gain the whole world if we forfeit the souls that we’re supposed to form? We can’t expect to remain free without being virtuous, we can’t be bold without being rooted, we can’t be great without aiming first to be good.”

God’s time is not our time.

While God dwells outside of time and space, we live within it and that is why we always seem to be in a hurry. While our clocks tick in seconds, His clock ticks in years.

In 2 Peter 3:8-9, the Apostle Peter reminds us:

“But, do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not willing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance.”

I heard an insightful sermon over the weekend concerning the well-known Bible story of two sisters, Mary and Martha.

Mary chose to sit at Jesus’ feet and learn, while Martha was distracted with preparations. While both meant well, Jesus commended Mary because she chose the “better part,” while Martha missed out.

I’m a born Martha and I want to stop missing out while there is still time — so those pesky worldly distractions have to go. All too often the “good” crowds out the “best.”

The Devil’s Best Trick

In his satirical novel, The Screwtape Letters, author C.S. Lewis wrote of the fictional demon “Screwtape,” who is training his novice nephew “Wormwood” in the fine art of tempting humans:

“Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.”

The most effective technique for squeezing good knowledge out of one’s mind is to consume its “bandwidth” with so many distractions that nothing else can get in.

Those distractions don’t need to be particularly bad (or good for that matter), just compelling enough to hold the subject’s attention. 

How About You?

In his book, The Complete Green Letters, Christian author Miles Stanford writes, “When God wants to make an oak, He takes a hundred years, but when He wants to make a squash, He takes six months.”

So, which one do you want to be?

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