How can we spend time with God when we're always plugged in?

Editor's Note: This article appears in the Sept./Oct. 2009 issue of RELEVANT, which releases today. Click here to view the digital edition, or pick it up at retailers nationwide.

My TV has 500 channels. My iPod has 7,000 songs. My Internet has like 30 billion pages. I have a cell phone with Internet and email. I’m never more than a phone call away from my parents. There are about 60 ways I can communicate electronically with any given person. So why is it like pulling teeth to get me to spend more than a few minutes each day talking to the Creator of the universe?

That’s what technology has done to us. Our sped-up, hyper-efficient, media-saturated world seems to be making it harder than ever to live pious, simple, disciplined Christian lives. There are just so many other options—a world of irrelevant and unimportant activity to engage in—and it’s all so terrifyingly accessible.

Important things like real community, prayer and Bible reading often get crowded out. Quite simply: We’re all just too freaking busy. While most of our new technologies are in theory meant to save us time, our lives are becoming decidedly more busy and our free time is dwindling to almost nil.

Why isn’t the ability to write emails on the bus helping to streamline our lives and make things simpler? Perhaps it’s because we can now write emails on the bus. We used to read books for fun on the bus. We used to just sit there and contemplate. Now, we can think of nothing better to do than stare down at our phone and try to think of a task that can be accomplished during this “downtime.”

The thought of sitting still and doing nothing is unfathomable. The prospect of simply hanging out and thinking for an extended period of time—well, it’s just so unproductive.

Unsurprisingly, this frenzied, obsessive-compulsive proclivity toward being digital busybodies has harmful effects on Christian disciplines like Bible study and prayer. After all, it’s pretty tedious to just sit and pray for an hour when there are Hulu videos to browse, “What Ninja Turtle are you?” quizzes to take and online “community” to cultivate. If we’re not wired, plugged in and communicating with the world at all times, it seems like such a waste of time.

In this environment, having the attention and focus to sit still and pray silently and single-mindedly for any amount of time is nearly impossible. “We’re always waiting for something to happen,” says Jenna Bartlo, a twentysomething PR professional from Los Angeles. “It’s hard to keep praying when we’re anxiously awaiting a text message.”

Bartlo believes Christians have to be intentional about sitting down—distraction free—and carving out time for God on a daily basis, even though it’s sometimes easier to just pray “in between” other activities throughout the day or while walking from one thing to the next.

“If you are just twittering to God your prayers throughout the day, then you are not taking the time to think about what you’re praying. God is still hearing those prayers, but you are not really seeking God.”

This is one of the biggest problems that must be reckoned with in the Twitter age: our ever-diminishing inclination and/or ability to slow down and think thoroughly, deeply and profoundly about anything. We speed through an article or web page in 60 seconds and pronounce it “read.” We see a blurb about our friend from high school’s weekend at the lake and pronounce the friendship “maintained.” But in this flurry of bite-sized narrative and dollar-menu mediation, are we able to truly be self-aware? Can we consider things and know God and ourselves?

At the end of the day, it’s just hard for us to have interior thought-lives anymore. It’s hard to keep anything to ourselves and be reflective just for ourselves. With Twitter, Facebook, blogs and the quick-and-easy communication efficiency of cell phones, we’ve gotten used to the notion that anything worth saying can and should be shared with the digital community in real time. Any idea or thought worth having should be public. Everything is cooperative, collective and wiki-oriented. When we sit alone and contemplate something that isn’t meant to be shared with the whole wide world, we almost don’t know what to do with ourselves.

Especially for younger generations, our identities are increasingly tied to social networking posturing, notes Todd Hall, professor of psychology at Biola and editor of the Journal of Psychology and Theology. “Older generations tend to view social networking technologies as functional tools, not as a way to define their identity,” Hall says. “But for the younger generations, social networking shapes their identity, and I think it makes it harder for them to be alone with God when they get used to this sort of constant interaction and ‘community.’”

It’s no wonder praying privately, silently and alone is a difficult endeavor for so many of us. Adding to the difficulty—the person we are talking to (God) is not speaking back to us, and it becomes nearly impossible. Instant feedback is such a crucial part of our technological, mediated existence today. If you post something on Facebook, you expect comments almost instantly. If you send a text, you expect a response. If you write a blog post and no one bothers to comment, you deem it a failure. Praying privately to an unresponsive God goes against all of our typical communication preferences.

The same logic applies to something like Bible reading. For the same reason reading any book alone for an extended period of time feels increasingly isolating and hard to sit through, having a “just me and my Bible” devotion time has become more and more difficult for those in the “wired” generations. It’s also hard for us to reckon with the intense requirements of context and “big picture” thinking that Bible study requires. In the Internet age, our minds have been trained to be OK with decontextualized, bite-sized flourishes of image, sound and text. But when we open our Bibles and try to make sense of one verse plucked out of context, it doesn’t really make sense. The meaning comes in the larger picture and the over-arching story. But that just takes too much time.

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