We must be real with the people God has put into our lives. We must tell the truth. We must be honest at work. We must be honest with our money. We must not be led by greed. We must be trusted friends. We must be reliable. The world needs what we must be: living examples of God-centered and joyful men and women who live out their trustworthiness. We aim to win back the sinner’s distrust. We are not flawless, we are repenters. We are not perfect, we are committed to living out authentic humanity in union with Christ.
The gospel spreads out from the authenticity of a people (see 1 Thessalonians 1:2–10). Christians engage the world face to face, a key point for parents to keep in mind. “I meet more and more kids that don’t know how to talk to people, and who don’t even want to look up from their screen,” Francis Chan told me. “It hurts the kingdom when we raise socially awkward children. We are raising soldiers. We are raising missionaries. Our job is to get these kids to where they can get into the world and start conversations with people and bring the light of Jesus and the message of the gospel to them” (“Dads and Family Leadership”). Eye-to-eye authenticity is the key to trust, and trust is the key social skill our kids must develop.
Protect Aloneness
So where does such a face-to-face authenticity come from?
One of the most respected psychologists of the digital age, Sherry Turkle, says, “The capacity for empathic conversation goes hand in hand with the capacity for solitude. In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic” (“Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.”).
Solitude is a precious gift: We all want it, we all need it. Solitude is the subtle marketing promise behind so many of our technological advances. Solitude was even a priority during the ministry of Jesus.
So what do we do with our aloneness once we have it?
We fumble it.
In our study of 8,000 regular readers of desiringGod.org, we asked whether you are more likely to check email and social media before or after your spiritual disciplines on a typical morning. Seventy-three percent of you said before. Such a stat will not shock any of us. We don’t cherish our solitude.
As John Piper explained, from his own experience, in the mornings we are immediately tempted with vanity in six directions. We grab our phones like we grab for junk food: to feed on the candy of our own egotism and to feed on novelty and on entertainment. We also impulsively reach for our phones to escape: to avoid the boredoms of life, the responsibilities of life and the hardships of life. Temptations like these make the phone alluring immediately in the morning (“Six Wrong Reasons to Check Your Phone in the Morning”).
It’s hard to summarize the resulting problem any better than this: “The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude” (Marche).
The equations seem to hold true for our early morning hours:
Isolation + feeding on vanity = soul-starving loneliness
Isolation + communion with God = soul-feeding solitude
The bottom line: Technology is almost always centripetal, naturally pulling us away from others into a habitat of loneliness. Paradoxically, habitual loneliness is what kills social media. As Christians, we push back our phones in the morning to protect our solitude in order to become authentic people. And we push back our phones during the day in order to build authentic eye-to-eye trust with the people in our lives. Without these two pushbacks in place, gospel mission stalls. With these pushbacks in place, gospel mission may flourish. With authentic relationships with one another, we are positioned to live as lights, recharged to spread words of the grace of Jesus Christ through our thumbs online.
