Research into Resources

It was over 400 years ago that Brother Lawrence wrote Practicing the Presence of God—that collection of instructional letters on how to relentlessly train our minds toward God. This 17^th-Century French monk spent his days washing dishes to the glory of God, ever focusing and refocusing his attention on Christ.  Essentially, he wired his brain to lean Godward.

While Brother Lawrence doubtless had a lot on his mind to distract him from God’s presence, this paragraph I read recently highlighted for me a strain I’ve been feeling with my own focus—on God or anything else:

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads… and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.¹

Now don’t get me wrong—I’m not planning on walking away from my online access anytime soon.  Without a doubt there are some unique benefits of today’s version of the internet that enhance ministry.  But like many youth workers, I’ve often adopted new technology without really paying attention to how it’s rewiring my habits or my thinking (see this article for more research on that topic).  When we add to the distraction of the internet the fact that it’s accessible to many of us continually on our cell phones—alongside an endless stream of text messages—and add to that the prolific expansion of social networking and cataloging options (who knew Twitter would gain so much steam over the past six months?), the impact builds up.

So what of practicing God’s presence in the midst of our ever-increasing technological portfolios?  One of Brother Lawrence’s (and perhaps Jesus’?) secrets seemed to be weaving an awareness of God’s active involvement in the world into every moment and every activity of the day.

His shtick was washing dishes.  Maybe yours is youth ministry.  Either way, in the midst of the incredible distractions that accompany each waking minute of the day, I want to build an alternative reality that welcomes God’s inbreaking kingdom into each of those minutes and tasks (maybe even googling).  As we continually rewire our focus toward God, perhaps we’ll even find ways to help our students chart their own paths through the rocks of distraction toward the quiet waters of God’s presence.

1. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making us Stupid?” Atlantic July/August 2008, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google. [↩]