Hopefully during this month, you’ll be able to connect with family and friends. This might be part of your vacation plans or simply mailing a postcard. For the electronically-inclined, these acts of “connectivity” also may include e-mail, Skype (video calls), Facebook, Twitter,
and other outlets.
The question of connectedness is a growing spiritual issue. I ask you to consider the following pluses and minuses.
Plus: Technology can link us with family and friends over vast distances, allowing us to exchange thoughts, photos, and updates more
frequently than an annual letter.
Minus: Technology creates distance between people, through the gap between those who use it and those who choose not to (or don’t have the resources), and in the loss of personal contact (substituting text for face-to-face conversations).
Plus: Our experience of the world is much richer through e-mails, videosharing, and Google connecting us with people and places across the globe.
Minus: Our understanding of the world is diminished because we encounter other cultures in less depth (sound-bite news stories) and through more haphazard (at times, unreliable) information sources.
Plus: Our spiritual lives are strengthened by the Internet when it allows us to keep in touch with a range of people, facilitate our prayer concerns being heard quickly by friends, and making available a variety of online devotional and church material right at our fingertips.
Minus: Our spiritual lives are diminished by the Internet with its demand of staying electronically connected 24/7, its blurring of “office hours” and “offhours,” and the “busyness” that undermines true Sabbath rest for the soul.
Hear Paul’s words of encouragement: “In Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away. Everything has become new! All this is from God, who is reconciled with us through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Remember this: Connectivity with Christ should precede all other connections. Newness of life is first spiritual, and then technological. To walk in nature, to breathe deeply, to hug a friend is a form of prayer. So this month, be people of prayer in a world of both natural and
technological wonders.