A Small Experiment

I recently conducted a little experiment and took a week off the internet. Well, not entirely– I still went to work and used websites I needed there. I also continued my DuoLingo streak (584 days and counting). But I took a break from all the usual websites that take up my time: Washington Post, BBC, Wall Street Journal, Facebook, running websites, blogs, YouTube, Reddit… all of it. I decided to replace all these sites with bible reading. What would happen if I combined a weeklong digital detox with something completely different?

I’m not the worst phone addict; my iPhone screen time tracker usually puts me at around 45 minutes a day on average, and a decent amount of that is just syncing my Garmin watch to my phone to track workouts and using a scanner app to upload documents at my job. On my days off, I usually spend fewer than fifteen minutes on my phone, rarely taking it with me around the house or on local errands. But I’m an admitted news junkie. After my morning run, Mr. Sense makes me a delicious breakfast and I enjoy it while catching up on politics and markets, followed most days by checking in on Facebook. During my week off, I swapped my laptop for my Bible and dove into Paul’s letters every morning. 

The morning routine adjustment was pretty easy– I didn’t even pick up my laptop. But I learned that I check in with the news more frequently than I realized during little breaks in the day. My work computer has a little bar at the bottom with the first few words of headlines, and I felt completely lost without being able to see any further. I gleaned from one of these that there was a new pope, but I couldn’t even check to see who it was! The same little bar occasionally flashed up the S&P 500/Dow Jones/Nasdaq trajectory for the day, but I didn’t have any status updates for tariff negotiations or world events. I longed to visit main pages for major news sites, not even to read articles, but just to know the basics. 

But one week isn’t that long and I didn’t cave. Instead of news and Facebook, I estimate I got in ten hours of bible reading. Joshua 1:8 instructs us to be in constant contact with God’s word, to “meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.” That sounds important, but my usual quick scan of my bible app’s daily verse probably doesn’t qualify as meditating day and night. 

For the first couple days, it felt weird to be clicking on the bible.com tab on my work computer anytime I had a few minutes free. Settling in to focus on God’s word for a real block of time each morning seemed like a healthy upgrade from my normal routine, but popping into Psalms or Proverbs for a couple minutes at the time when my mind was still half on my work felt irreverent. Is it okay to use the Bible as a kind of background music that I don’t devote my full attention to even when it’s right in front of me? We’re talking about God-breathed material; the catechism I memorized as a kid says the bible was written by “holy men who were taught by the Holy Spirit.” 

This line of thought made me consider my theological journey so far. I grew up in a church that emphasized the gift of having a personal relationship with God. I prayed to God before every math test, the night before my gym class ran the mile, and when I hoped a boy would notice me. As a child, I made a point to mentally add “please” before each petition in the Lord’s Prayer, because that’s how you politely address others, especially friends. 

When Mr. Sense and I started attending the Episcopal church, I found the liturgy and rhythm beautiful, but the Book of Common Prayer didn’t have much in common with my usual prayers. Something about those prayers really stuck in my brain, though. They were fancier, without grammatical or theological errors, but they seemed formal. Did that mean they weren’t as “real” or heartfelt as my fervent prayers as an adolescent, asking God to guide my college applications into the hands of the right admissions people? Mr. Sense and I kept returning to the Episcopal church and I kept thinking about this. We talked about it a lot. Mr. Sense grew up Catholic and was much more familiar with the structure of this kind of worship, and much less used to checking in with the Bible itself to answer questions like “am I going to the right church?”

The Episcopal liturgy opened my understanding of God as Creator of the universe. He is a bigger God than I had imagined before. The intensity of the prayers, especially the repetition of phrases like “through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever,” seemed appropriate when I considered God this way. But I still feel God’s presence locally– I believe God does care about my little personal concerns. 

Meditating on scripture implies a certain level of focus or mindfulness. The text demands thought, but that doesn’t mean it’s not helpful to have it “on” even as I’m standing in line at the grocery store or waiting for a customer to walk back to my office at work.

The process of memorizing biblical passages highlights this. I’m blessed with a good brain for memorization, and I value having a mental bank of Bible verses to draw on in different situations. When I memorize longer sections, I obviously think through the meaning of the passage first– that’s a big part of how I decide which parts to memorize– but then there’s a larger chunk of time devoted to the actual memorization. Writing it down over and over, listening to it read aloud on repeat, saying the trickier parts out loud until I have it down. During this part of the process, I’m not exactly meditating on the meaning, but I’m still getting more intimately connected with God’s word. 

Having lots of bible tabs open “in the background” because there was space without news or social media to distract me achieved a similar purpose. I felt spiritually refreshed just having the Bible so close by, only a tab away. 

I’m still happy to have access to the news again now, but I want to hold on to the lessons I learned from this short experiment. There are so many tiny breaks in my day. When I’m with my husband or kids, I purposefully avoid my phone during those times so I can be present with them. But when it’s just me, I’m quick to fill the time with a quick peek at the stock market or other headlines. Those moments add up, and just like I don’t check in with the internet when I’m around my family, I can make time to prioritize my relationship with God by using some of those moments for quiet prayer or Bible reading.