Hi everyone!
Welcome to the first week of August. This summer has been a weird one for us, but the opening of August means that school is just over two weeks away from starting. We’ve been in full swing with book and supply shopping, revisiting the dorm checklist, and doing paperwork of various kinds. The Google calendar (coincidentally mentioned below) is working overtime. Little plumes of smoke rise up off my laptop when I visit it1.
I am grateful for the breakneck pace because it means the kids are growing.
The Part Where There’s an Essay: Technology, the Mule
My plan for August is to spend some time on thoughts around technology, the internet, and how we interact as Christians. Later this month I’ll outline the methods and tools we’ve found helpful here in our home.
We bought our first cell phone in 2000. It was a Nokia phone, with that classic ring that readers of a certain age will remember. It looked like a small brick with a keypad and a small digital display.
The motivation for the decision was my pregnancy with our first child. In the seventh month of gestation, the baby (now our 22-year-old oldest son) was experiencing extreme variations in his heart rate. His heart would speed up, slow down, beat irregularly, and occasionally stop altogether. In one routine appointment when Doppler detected this condition, I went from having a normal, healthy pregnancy to having a high-risk pregnancy2. One of the conclusions from this turn of events was the decision that I ought to be able to reach my husband quickly.
We’ve also nearly always had the internet around. We are both Gen-Xers, that generation that’s lodged in between analog and digital — we like it this way. During my freshman year of college, I had to bring my 3.5” floppy to the computer lab to access my college email account. By the time I graduated, the dorms were all wired for internet access. Within a few years, being “wired” for the internet was becoming outdated as wifi became more popular. Things were changing quickly.
If you consider a continuum of people from those who reject tech to those who welcome it, we tend to fall in the middle. We held on to a landline telephone for a long time. We pick up and drop streaming services all the time. We will probably never have cameras in our home. We have all kinds of blocks and limits on our wifi and our devices. But we welcome the advantages that tech brings, also.
At the outset, I want to acknowledge two things. One, tech gives us a great deal of power, and I enjoy it and benefit from it all the time. The pandemic was that much easier because we were able to stay connected to people and enjoy little bits of humor and beauty that people sent out on the internet. Google Calendar is the reason why my family of seven3 juggled a schedule through homeschooling, church planting, and all the many commitments those things bring. And obviously, you’re reading a newsletter that I publish on the internet, delivered to you in your email inbox: a virtual world that was not possible four decades ago.
The second thing we should acknowledge is that tech has brought about problems and challenges that we weren’t prepared for at the outset. This is usually the way of things: something is invented, we haven’t fully considered the cost because it’s never existed before, we observe for a while, and hopefully, we make changes. Internet connectivity, smartphones, and social media (to name a few — I’m not going to get into AI here) are in many ways opposed to human flourishing. As the years pass, we are seeing more evidence of harm. (One need only consider Jonathan Haidt’s work with mental health and girls to get started.) And though the pandemic was made easier in many ways by tech, it was also that much more difficult as people succumbed to online myths and conspiracy theories.
So we have a continuum available to us when faced with the use of tech. On one end, we have the option to shun it all — to become Luddites and renounce all uses of it, even those that might be good. On the other end, we have the option to embrace it all, succumbing to those pitfalls seen and unseen along the way.
As I said earlier, we tend to fall in the uncomfortable middle somewhere — attempting to redeem and embrace parts of tech, while maintaining tension, mindfulness, and accountability along the way.
In pursuing this middle ground, one illustration I have found helpful is in Tony Reinke’s book 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You. In the introduction, John Piper compares his iPhone to a mule:
“Mules are not kept for their good looks. They just get the job done. The job is not to impress anybody….don’t waste your life grooming your mule. Make him bear the weight of a thousand works of love.”
This defines well the approach I’d love to take toward technology in my own life. Don’t make it out to be more than it is — it can’t reproduce real-life experiences of love, friendship, or embodied living. But it can serve us. The problems occur when we are serving it.
For the Anglophiles
The Atlantic gave us a photo essay on London’s Urban Foxes:
Reads & Listens of the Week
This month I’m experimenting with using an Evergreen planner in place of my usual bullet journal. I’ll let you know how it goes (provided you are interested, which you might not be), but the accompanying podcast is helpful if you’re someone looking for help with juggling time and commitments.
Admittedly I have not seen the Barbie movie yet (I have plans to this weekend), but I know there’s been a lot of chatter about it online. I appreciated this thread from Kevin Twit, who saw it with his wife and daughter: “This is a cultural moment, and I’m mystified by all the Christians who would miss the opportunity this movie provides for real dialogue about how difficult life after the fall is for everyone - but especially women, bombarded as they are by so many contradictory visions of the good life on our culture.”
Two of my favorite comedians, Mike Birbiglia and Jim Gaffigan, sat down and chatted on Mike’s podcast last week.
David French gave a few good explanations of things that have been happening in the news recently on The Holy Post.
...the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety. - Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
not actually true.
For those of you who want the end of the story: by the time the baby was born, his heart rate had stabilized and we never saw the irregularity again.
Yes indeed, everyone has their own color. Occasionally a friend catches a glimpse of my calendar and starts gasping for air.
I’m convinced that fox in front of 10 Downing St is photoshopped 😂 (no idea urban foxes were such a thing in London!)