Cell Phones & Selfishness

I just spent a weekend with some incredible men, learning how to be a better husband, father and man.  One of the  greatest things about this weekend was that I had no cell service and I actually turned off my phone.  That was so freeing for me. Now it's not that I get a lot of text messages or phone calls anyway, but to be free of it was amazing, and I loved it!

I've noticed something that actually kind of bothers me about cell phones, and that is how much people's noses are stuck in the stupid things all the time.  We've all experienced it, you get together with family or friends and 90% of the people in the room are more focused on the life in that little screen than the life going on around them.  You try to have a conversation with someone, you make a comment or ask them a question only to realize that they didn't hear what you said, because their attention is on that little screen.

To be really honest about that, it makes me feel horrible when that happens.  When this happens to me, something inside feels diminished.  Like I'm not important enough to be heard.  I'm sure you've had that happen to you, how'd it make you feel?  The funny thing about this is how we fool ourselves into thinking that we are being more social.

Distraction is the one tool of the enemy that really works well.  He doesn't have to cause us to blatantly sin to mess us up.  I'm reminded of something from C.S. Lewis's book; The Screwtape Letters.

The following excerpt from The Screwtape Letters is, I think, one of C.S. Lewis’ most sublime arguments. The senior demon, Screwtape, is trying to help his new tempting nephew, Wormwood, keep the new Christian sliding away from his faith. Within this part of Letter XII are several brilliant quotations and key points of subtle spiritual struggles.

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And 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.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,

Your affectionate uncle

SCREWTAPE

I have to think that if C.S. Lewis were alive and writing this today, he would have added cell phones to the list of things to distract us from the goal.  There will be those who say, but you don't understand I have to stay in contact with so and so, or with this or that.  But I would ask, why?  Why is it so much more important to be on that phone with people who are not in the same room with you?  Before cell phones and internet access 24/7 there was a time and a place for staying in contact with people. We made time to do what needed to be done, and it worked.  Why won't it work now? It will, we just have to make time for what we need to do.  We have to prioritize our time, and make the time for everything that is important to us.

I feel that if relationships are what Jesus is after, and there is something which diminishes those then perhaps it is being used by our enemy to keep us from where we need to be going.  Just a thought.  Strength and honor for the Kingdom and the King!