A lot of people will tell you that cell phones are a detriment to your prayer life. Your eyes glued to a small screen, your head fills up with a zillion inane details, and you don’t even notice the beauties of the God-given world around you, let alone the person you are about to bump into.
I could easily go into a harangue about people distracted from the joys of life while staring at their phones. I could bemoan the decline of civility, the increase in self-involvement, the absurd dependency we place in a tiny piece of electronic equipment.
But that would probably be dishonest of me because, yes, I have upon occasion found myself walking down the street staring into my phone. And yes, the first thing I do every morning is pick up my phone and see who might have sent me a text or an email. And okay, there’s a prayer app I check but I’m just as eager to see what the weather is going to be today.
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As Jesus would say, don’t complain about that splinter in someone else’s eye–or cell phone–when you’ve got a log in your own.
Yes, yes, yes, cell phones can offer nagging distractions from what’s important in life, but sometimes the distractions they offer can be holy and good and right.
Not long ago I was in the hospital getting a series of not-all-that-pleasant and worrisome tests. As I was waiting in a dismally spare, windowless room, my phone suddenly buzzed. I picked it up to see a message from a good friend who recently got married.
All at once she and I were texting back and forth about the delights of her wedding, the Bible verse she’d asked me to read, the great music we danced to, the sterling character of her husband. In the exchange did I once tell her where I was?
No, not once.
Our little conversation was a blessing, spiriting me away from the worries and tedium of modern medicine, a breath of fresh air at a time I needed it.
It dawned on me that here was an example of a text being like a prayer. There is a lot of spiritual ink spilled on the topic of “living in the now,” staying in the present moment. Considering the birds of the air and lilies, as Christ would have put it.
But prayer can also take you right out of the now when the now is a struggle and remind you what is most important: friendship, love, faithfulness.
So here’s my prayer for you and me and our cell phones. Let’s be careful how we use them. Let’s not get caught up in too much of the nonsense that spills out onto the screen.
But let us also give thanks for the times these little devices connect us to what’s good and godly. They do from time to time. They really do.
