God answers all of our prayers.

Sometimes He says no, sometimes He says yes, sometimes He says not yet.

And sometimes He uses your 18-month old’s fascination with the toilet to give clear direction.

Two weeks ago I reached an impasse with my phone. I’ve known the power it has over me for quite some time, and have tried in many different ways to limit its use. Though some of these are helpful, I still can’t escape the fact that it becomes my desire in moments of weakness (of which I have no shortage). I had been praying about what it would look like to do a fast from my phone until my birthday in mid-June. Not just fasting from my phone, but entering into a season of intentional prayer. I wasn’t hearing clearly from God so I prayed again – God what should I do?

I’ve been trying to allow Ben more freedom in our apartment as to teach him how to engage appropriately with household items that are as we say…“yucky.” We now let him into the room that stores our garbage and dirty laundry as well as occasionally letting him peruse the bathroom in a supervised manner (I cannot with words describe his obsession with the toilet brush). As I was making dinner early last week and listening to a podcast, all of a sudden the sound coming through my bluetooth speaker started cutting in and out and ultimately garbled into silence. I rushed to the bathroom to see sweet Ben standing over the toilet and giving me the proudest smile a 1.5 year old could muster, my iPhone drowning in the toilet bowl.

And so it is – I’ve been granted the gift of a phone free summer. 

I want to journal (sometimes publicly) through this process as a way of encouraging friends and readers into meaningful pursuits. It’s easy to blame phones and technology for our lack of focus or time, but in reality they are only as powerful as we let them be. A few months ago I looked at my phone and asked it (out loud) – is this the end of civilization? Will we lose this war to you? Of course the answer is no, but this pursuit of meaningful relationships and quiet space in our minds must be sought intentionally. Seeds do grow, just with more care and time than weeds need.

I was doing some writing about technology a few months back and realized that with most things, the smartphone can function in two ways for those who have one. It can be a tool or it can be a vice.

A tool is something you use to build something else, something meaningful and helpful. Who could have a house without a hammer? The smartphone is perhaps one of the most powerful tools we’ve ever seen (something even as a child I would have thought only the Jetsons would ever own). There is much good that can be accomplished with this device – good worth pursuing.

A vice on the other hand is something that is designed to hold something in place, a power created by two sides putting as much pressure on the object as possible. I hope we can all agree this is not the kind of relationship we want with our phone. Yet for a lot of us that’s exactly what it is. It grips us, locks us down, projects a life that is impossible without it. Even when we hate it we can’t let it go.

If you want to read along on this journey, I gladly invite you! But please know – my goal is not to eliminate the smartphone from my life or from yours. I don’t intend to demonize the device in any way – for everyone’s relationship with it is different and as I said, it is a powerful tool. But for me, it has become a vice. And I would like to live a life where my phone is at best a tool, and at the least not the center of my attention.

I’ve fasted all sorts of things throughout various seasons of my life, and I’ve found that successful growth usually happens not only in the absence of something – but the pursuit of something better. Now that I no longer need to focus on managing my use of the phone, I want to turn my attention to the areas I want to grow – specifically the areas I feel God is highlighting right now. (Because if I try to focus on reading, cooking, exercising, studying, writing, praying and sleeping more…I will succeed at probably none of them).

So right now, I’m working on prayer. Better said, I’m inviting the Lord to teach me again how to pray and seek.

More to come.