The Benefits of Powering Down
Powering Down, you have spent X hours and X minutes a day on your screen this week. On Sunday mornings my phone comes to life, pestering me with the same message glowing in a way that draws my eye like a moth to a porch light.
On Sunday mornings my phone comes to life, pestering me with the same message glowing in a way that draws my eye like a moth to a porch light. The irony is, I always get this notification when I’m in church. And I always swipe it away (because I’m listening to the sermon, of course). I can’t be bothered to know how much of my life I am wasting staring at this screen that lures my attention everywhere I go. For leaders wrestling with boundaries around devices, Sabbath rest for leaders can offer a helpful counterpoint to the lure of constant connection.
One Sunday, however, I decided to do the math. The notification told me that I was averaging seven hours and 23 minutes a day on my phone. I multiplied that by seven days and quickly realized I was spending almost 50 hours a week looking at my phone. That is two entire cycles of the sun. That equals over three months a year looking at my phone. Then I did one last equation: If I live to be 73 years old, I will spend over seven years of the remaining approximate 25 years of my life looking at my phone—time that, if left unchecked, can contribute to overcoming ministry burnout or even help leaders recognize and avoid unhealthy ministry culture.
Now granted, I make my living on my phone. I tell stories on Instagram. I share words that hopefully lead people toward freedom in some way. I have raised over $1 million on my phone for people in need. I mean it’s not all bad, right? Of course not. But I also knew that I didn’t want to lose those seven years.
When I told my wife what my average screen time was, she asked me a single question: “So, what are you going to do about it?” I needed to do something drastic. And something drastic is what I did.
The Experiment
I made the decision not to look at a single screen for seven weeks. Not an iPhone, not an Apple Watch, not an iPad. No TV, no laptop or tablet. And during those seven weeks, I wasn’t just going to go live in a cabin in the mountains and wait it out. No, I wanted to be surrounded by communities that not only were living differently than I was when it came to technology, but also were people with deep faith.
Why? Because I was fairly certain that these screens were muting the voice of God in my life.
As Christian leaders, sometimes I think we forget that we don’t actually need screens—that ministry happened without them for thousands of years, and although they are helpful, maybe, just maybe, we have formed a relationship with them that we were never supposed to form. Maybe these screens have placed God in a box that he was never supposed to exist in.
So, I decided first to live with 20 Benedictine monks at Saint Andrews Abbey in Southern California (they also live in 23 hours a day of silence, I might add). And then I would live on an Amish sheep farm in Holmes County, Ohio, which is home to the largest concentration of Amish in the U.S.
