Audio Blog from PTA

One thing that is lost in our culture is the ability to just sit and "be still." The Psalms tell us to "Be Still and know that I am God." God speaks to the prophet Elisha in a still small voice. Sometimes a key to knowing God's will is to spend time alone in silence. Call it the art of reflection, but yet it is more than that. It is also just plain listening.

Life isn't always about doing as much as you can and working yourself into a state of physical or mental exhaustion. Yes, God calls us to push on towards the prize. However, God did set aside a day established for rest. There is a thin line between being lazy and pushing oneself too hard. If we are working hard, we shouldn't feel guilty for falling short. There is too much to do in the world to be able to feasibly do all of it.

This makes it vitally important to make sure that we are good stewards of our time. If we can't do everything, what does God want us to be doing? Do we spend more time in service or more time in prayer and reading of the Word?

The following is an audio blog excerpt from 3/4 PTA on a topic that I have wrestled through with my own thoughts.

“This Is Your Brain Online”
by Betsey Newenhuyse
“Is Google making us stupid?” was the title of the cover story in the Atlantic Monthly
magazine a few months back. The Atlantic is famous for long, in-depth articles with
hardly any pictures that make you feel smart when you read them, and this piece was no
exception, arguing that the way we read and seek information on the Internet is affecting
our ability to concentrate, focus, think deeply about complicated things … and get
through long articles.
Then there was the teenager I read about in the Washington Post who sends over six
thousand text messages a MONTH. That comes out to like two hundred a day. She even
takes her cellphone with her to bed. Her mother worries about her daughter being able to
carry on a face-to-face conversation. Experts have raised concerns about the ability of
these kids to focus. One professor said he advises his faculty to lecture in shorter
sentences. And one Harvard professor said, quote, “I can’t help but surmise that it will
change the way [these kids] think.”
Now, practically ever since Johann Gutenberg invented movable type in the 1400s,
people have been raising alarms about media and entertainment dumbing us down. Not
long ago I came across an essay written in 1860s England where the writer lamented the
shallowness of the culture and wistfully looked back to an imagined golden age. At
various times comic books, the live theatre, cheap detective novels, rock and roll, and, of
course, television have been blamed for turning us into ignorant blobs something like the
people in “Wall-E” who live their lives glued to their screens and their chairs. When TV
was the dominant medium in the ’70s and ’80s there was a lot of talk about how we were
becoming primarily visual, and was that making us stupid?
So how is this any different? Well, for one thing, you can’t sleep with a TV set. Today’s
digital media are so omnipresent and seemingly omni-competent. A young man I work
with was showing me his iPhone the other day. Man, those things are sweet – you can
email and tweet and watch the YouTube and get on the Internet and download music –
and isn’t it interesting that people twenty years ago would have NO idea what I just said.
This gadget will even help you build a house—you can get a carpenter’s level added on!
And my daughter tells me there’s a feature where, if you hear a song somewhere like a
store, the gizmo quote-unquote “listens” and can identify it for you!
Amazing … and I suspect it’s only the beginning.
I don’t want to get all gee-whiz about the wonders of technology. And honestly, I don’t
think it’s making us stupid. But I do think it’s worth asking, what does all this mean for
us, human beings, made in God’s image? You know, you can say people don’t change,
and certainly we see from Scripture that humanity has always wrestled with questions of
love, power, courage, fear, greed.
But think about, say, an illiterate peasant in Ireland in the year 1000 AD. He has no
concept of distance or time; his life is governed by the cycles of nature; everything is
immediate, his fields, his village, his chickens. Nothing is abstract. His world is limited to
what he can hear, see, touch. He only knows a handful of people.
Now think of a young person in Chicago today. Her life is governed by speed, distance,
instant communication, 24/7 access to ideas and interaction. She’s never known anything
else. She’s grown up looking at screens and doing more than one thing at once. She’s
never out of touch, and she’s connected in some way with hundreds of people.
Friends, that has to have an impact on who you are and how you see life, relationships …
faith. How? I don’t know. We’re in uncharted waters here. I do know that we in the
church need to be reflecting deeply, with vision and imagination, on these questions, on
how we speak AND listen to a world that … as always … needs a Savior. And that does
not change.
For Moody Radio, this is Betsey Newenhuyse.