Strangely Dim

When I was a teenager, I didn’t know families like mine. We went to churches where people raised their hands, spoke in tongues, and occasionally ran through the aisles praising Jesus. None of my friends went to these churches. In fact, I don’t remember my friends going to church at all. And this was a problem, because more than anything, I desperately wanted to be like everyone else.

My mom was a real problem. She didn’t seem to care at all about fitting in with the cool kids’ moms. She didn’t even know them. She spent a lot of time reading her Bible and praying. She even did really weird things like fast a week out of every month. And she listened to Christian music ALL the time. I remember blatantly lying about it. When a friend came over and asked what this music was we were listening to—David Meece, Kim Boyce, Second Chapter of Acts, and the like—I answered, “My aunt and uncle work for a church, and they send us this music so we can tell them what we think of it. We sort of have to listen to it.” My aunt and uncle were in ministry, but they certainly weren’t sending us David Meece tapes. I was just too embarrassed to explain why we weren’t listening to the same music as everyone else.

Of course I was listening to everyone else’s music. I was doing everything everyone else was doing. My dad and brother were, too. I remember us even sort of mocking my mom, talking about how she didn’t live in the real world. She thought about Jesus all the time and gave our stuff away to the poor and the needy. Definitely not the real world. The real world was where you watched Dynasty and practiced the moon walk and stressed out over prom. There was a place and time for Jesus, but He didn’t exactly fit in with my everyday life.

And now I, like so many other women before me, have become my mother. I still have a subscription to People magazine, I watch a little TV, and I will watch the royal wedding later this week with mild interest. But the things of this world are growing more dim. I care less and less about popular music, popular books, popular culture. I care more and more about the fruit of the spirit, serving the poor, and waiting anxiously for Jesus’ return. I don’t really listen to anything but Christian music. It anchors me in truth and chases away my anxiety; I can’t not listen to it. I read Christian books. I read the Bible because I actually enjoy it. I journal my prayers to God. I talk to Him throughout the day. I talk about Him throughout the day. I find it hard to have conversations without bringing up His truths and teachings. I’m still a mess of a sinner, certainly no holier than anyone else, but this has become my real world. And you know what? I don’t think it’s just because I’m 40 now. I think this was the “real world” all along. Go figure. Mom was right.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face. And the things of earth will go strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.

Feeling Easter

My city is home to several megachurches. That earns us our share of negative publicity, but it also means we have opportunities to attend world-class events. Braden and I went to one of these on Friday night, New Life Church’s production of The Thorn. Kevin and I went to it 12 years ago, when I was pregnant with Braden, and as Jesus’ blood splattered on us, I remember thinking, “I will never take my child to this.”

But there I was, sitting with him on Friday night, front and center, inches away from Jesus as he carried his cross, his skin ripped and bleeding. Braden and I clung to each other through most of the performance. It’s a sensory marvel—much more Cirque du Soleil than 12 years ago—but very intense. I’m not sure if it was Braden clinging to me or the other way around. I started crying at the story of creation and continued right through the resurrection.

I cried over the great love Jesus showed, especially to little children. I cried at the miracles, especially at the blind man, who had lived in darkness every day of his life, opening his eyes for the first time to see the face of his creator and savior. I wept over Judas’s decision to betray his friend Jesus. You could see his regret, almost feel his remorse as he embraced Jesus in the garden, guards in tow. And the most poignant scene was one I don’t think much about—Barabbas, in chains and sentenced to death, being set free because Jesus took his place. He was the first to understand that miraculous exchange. I wonder what the rest of his life was like?

I’ve not seen The Passion of the Christ. I’ve basically been too scared. I hate watching torture scenes—Braveheart made me nauseous—and I hate being disturbed. The portrayal I saw Friday night was definitely disturbing, especially when I recognize that it happened for my own sake. But that’s the reason I need to watch it. I need to be disturbed. I need to understand how great is my sin, how deeply it separated me from God, and how great is the payment for it. If I’m not disturbed, then I miss the point of Easter.

But the tears didn’t come because I was disturbed; they came because I was sorry. And thankful. And profoundly moved. Despite the layers of busyness, distraction, sin, and self-sufficiency that I allow to build up within me, despite the familiarity to the point of nearly taking it all for granted, I am still deeply moved and affected by Jesus’ life and death. There is a holy and just God who sent His only son to die for me. As I watched the story play out with my only son, I felt the cost in a new way. I felt Easter.

Can You Feel Your Mind Changing?

There are very few things more pleasurable to me than sinking into a good book. I mostly read non-fiction, but occasionally I will choose fiction for the pure fun of it. Movies and TV shows allow us to escape to an alternate world for a time, but nothing does this like a book. It’s a world that I create, with the author’s help, for myself. I am the designer, and I bring all my own real-life experiences to bear as I bring people, places, events to life in my mind. It’s an experience like no other.

Writer Sven Birkerts calls the time spent engrossed in a novel “deep time.” In his 1994 book The Gutenberg Elegies, he argues that without the kind of deep time—deep thought, resonance, and reflection—that comes from reading, wisdom never forms.

This is the opposite of the kind of reading we do on the Internet, which rewards quick, shallow reading. An endless flow of information, punctuated by countless hyperlinks to even more endless information, produces in us a type of “bottom-up distraction,” in which we are so preoccupied with trivial information that we never arrive at deep thought at all. We are becoming a civilization not of readers but of power browsers, “suckers for irrelevancy,” says one Stanford researcher, who are “training our brains to pay attention to crap,” says another.

Now, honestly, I was paying attention to crap long before the Internet came along. It’s not that there’s less crap in print than online, but it’s how your brain processes whatever it is you’re reading that’s the point. According to Nicholas Carr in The Shallows, study after study has shown that the mind of an experienced book reader is a calm, focused mind. The Internet, on the other hand, fosters a state of constant buzz and distraction.

Is there wisdom to be found on the web? Of course. But I tend to agree that you can’t just glance at something and become wise from it. You have to process it, churn it around in your brain. You have to take time to reflect. And that seems to be the biggest way technology is cutting into our lives. We’re too busy browsing, juggling, surfing, seeking out entertainment, to sit quietly and reflect. Kids play video games in the car instead of looking out the window and wondering why there’s one black cow in the midst of all the brown ones. They grab their parents’ iPhones any time any kind of wait is required. We sit down at Red Robin and there’s a screen with Internet access available to us so that we don’t have to make our own conversation. There are apps for one-year-olds so they’ll learn early on to stare at a screen instead of studying the world around them.

Wisdom comes through reflection. You don’t have to be a book reader to find it, but you do have to have a calm, restful, focused mind.

“When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking and superficial learning. . . . It’s not just that we use the Net regularly, even obsessively. It’s that the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli that have been show to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions. With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use” (“The Juggler’s Brain,” The Shallows).

We’re thankful for it, we can’t imagine our lives without it, and we’re not going to stop using it. But let’s not use it without recognizing what it’s doing to us.

And that, for now, is all I have to say about that.

Frenzied Souls

I am addicted to checking e-mail, I’ll just admit it. It’s one of the last things I do before going to bed and one of the first things I do when I get up. I am occasionally guilty of greeting my computer before my kids and husband when I walk in the door. I recently got a smart-ish phone—it’s only as smart as its user, and in my case, that’s not saying much—so I'm never away from my e-mail for longer than a gym workout. I curse all those texters on the road, but I’m ashamed to admit that I am guilty of occasionally checking my e-mail at a stop light. (This is one of the biggest reasons I avoid Facebook. Another addiction—and an additional 800 friends to keep up with—is not what I need.)

I’ve never been much of a shopper, so surfing the web for deals doesn’t hold much appeal for me. I rarely download or upload anything. I google things here and there as I need to, but it’s really e-mail that’s the draw of the Internet for me. Connecting with people is what I do. And if I’m honest, it also feeds my need to feel important, needed, included. That’s why this paragraph from The Shallows felt familiar to me:

"Because we’re often using our computers in a social context, to converse with friends or colleagues, to create ‘profiles’ of ourselves, to broadcast our thoughts through blog posts or Facebook updates, our social standing is, in one way or another, always in play, always at risk. The resulting self-consciousness—even, at times, fear—magnifies the intensity of our involvement with the medium. That’s true for everyone, but it’s particularly true for the young, who tend to be compulsive in using their phones and computers for texting and instant messaging. . . . If they stop sending messages, they risk becoming invisible.”

It doesn’t take much for a stay-at-home mom who now only dabbles in work remotely to feel socially invisible. But is habitual texting, Facebooking, and e-mailing the way I want to solve this?

Author Nicholas Carr argues that the Net makes us hungry, and the more we feed our brains with it, the hungrier we get. (Sounds like addiction, eh?) In the process, our minds get busier and busier, our to-do lists longer and longer. I find myself composing e-mails in my sleep and waking up to a list of 15 messages I need to send before I can even get out the cereal or open my Bible.

In the 1950s, some accidental prophet named Martin Heidegger wrote that “the frenziedness of technology threatens to entrench itself everywhere.” (And this was in the ’50s, for Pete’s sake!) Nicholas Carr ends The Shallows by saying, “It may be that we are now entering the final stage of that entrenchment. We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls.”

I feel it in my soul. Do you?