Are You Battling This 21st Century Greed?

Kyle and I sat at dinner out, away from children, and I still couldn’t relax and enjoy myself. I was distracted and had been consistently for weeks. Slumped at the table, I stared at him and tried to explain how I was feeling.

“I feel overrun with thoughts and emotions, many of them sad and discontented and that I can’t figure out. My brain feels like it’s being pulled in a million different directions. What is going on with me?”

Kyle, after listening to my winding trail of thoughts for many minutes replied, “You check email a lot. You’re on your phone a lot.”

My purse sat on the booth seat beside me, and inside my phone’s blinking green light beckoned even as he said those words. He’s right, I thought. I immediately recalled a conversation I’d had with a group of women about our children and technology. What was it one of them had said? When people are on their phones, they’re not present in their lives. They’re going someplace else.

Well, that just sort of explained it all—the discontentedness, the obsessive comparison with other women, the uncertainty and its resulting pursuit of online evidence that I’m successful and/or loved, the desire for what I don’t have and wonder if I’ll ever have, the pride. I’d only been checking my phone in every down moment, but it seemed apparent that such simple, seemingly inconsequential acts of swiping and scrolling were not so simple and inconsequential after all. Ugh.

The next morning, I opened my Bible, gave this issue to the Lord, and waited. I knew He was going to talk to me about it, and He did.

“God, help me. I’ve allowed technology to distract me beyond measure. I’m causing myself great pain.”

It seemed as if God were saying, “Doesn’t this remind you of something you just read recently, something about piercing yourself through with many sorrows? What does it say?”

This is what I’d just read in 1 Timothy 6:9-10:

“But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”