From one of those lists that get forwarded around the Internet, here are several warning signs you may be a little too “connected.”
You try to enter your computer password on the microwave.
You have a list of 15 phone and pager numbers and e-mail addresses to reach your family of three.
You e-mail your kid in his room to tell him dinner is ready. He e-mails you back: “What’s for dinner?”
In the future, predicts one business forecast, the Internet will connect everyone through miniature units combining computer, telephone and other functions — all integrated into your clothing. Sit down for this one, guys: Shopping will consist of “almost effortless thought-pattern… requests.”
That’s old news for folks who grew up watching “The Jetsons” and reading science fiction. Sci-fi writers predicted brain-implanted, computer-chip telepathy decades ago.
The Internet’s potential for missions education, communication and mobilization is limitless. Like a drug, however, it must be handled with care.
Unhealthy Obsession
The addictive nature of electronic interactivity is well-documented. One recent report from the e-front: Mitch Maddox of Dallas legally changed his name to “DotComGuy” and promises not to leave his house for the entire year 2000. He’s communicating with the world almost exclusively through the internet to illustrate its possibilities (and make a healthy profit through e-commerce sponsorships).
Even for those of us who don’t spend 18 hours a day online, the Internet joins the legion of other media that compete for our every conscious movement. What time is left for the One who commands us to love Him with all our heart, all our strength, all our mind?
Despite reports to the contrary, God doesn’t have a Web site. He doesn’t even have an e-mail. A mind driven by interactive distraction and instant chat, a mind possessed by the compulsive need to check e-mail or phone mail or CNN, cannot love Him with undivided devotion. It has become afflicted with spiritual attention deficit disorder.
Even missionaries aren’t immune to the malady, regardless of how far away from high-tech centers they serve. The old stereotype of the missionary armed with a Bible and a pith helmet is giving way to the stereotype of the missionary wielding a laptop, mobile phone and global positioning system.
Modern communication technologies have given us many gifts — great amounts of information, enormous vistas of opportunity and connections to the world Christians of earlier eras never could have imagined. But they rob us — if we let them — of a more precious gift: the interior silence God alone inhabits.
“Abide in Me, and I in you,” Jesus says. “As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you, unless you abide in Me. … For apart from Me, you can do nothing” (John 15:4,5 NASB).
The vital connection between abiding and doing is clear. We must love God before we can love our neighbor — or the nations — for He is the source of transforming love.
The Psalms, Scripture’s great songs of praise, open with the promise that the righteous person’s “delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night. And he will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season …” (Psalm 1:2,3 NASB).
If you never disconnect from the incessantly beeping inbox of modern life, how do you delight in the Lord and meditate on His law day and night? You don’t.
Turn off your machine of choice for a while and think about that. Quietly.
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