As many of you know, for the last two years New Denver Church has been developing a partnership with a church in the small Guatemalan village of San Pablo la Laguna (to read more about our decision to work in Guatemala check out the New Denver website). Our strategy is to establish a relationship with this church and their pastor, Antonio Moxnay, in order to contribute to lasting change over a long period of time. We are focusing all our efforts on this one village.

Last year I had the opportunity to take my first trip to San Pablo and was moved both by the heart of pastor Antonio for the people in this village and by the physical and spiritual needs he is trying to address. This June I will be heading back to Guatemala with a few other people from New Denver, including my seven-year-old son Ethan.

Ethan has asked us about going to Guatemala several times, and we always told him he had to wait until he was older. When it became clear that this was going to be a smaller trip, I began to feel like maybe this was the right time to take him. As Kate and I talked about it and prayed about it, we felt like this might be a great opportunity. Our hope is that the experience of experiencing another culture and being exposed to people who have far less materially than we do will leave a lasting impression on Ethan. Click here to read the note Ethan wrote to share about our trip.

There are two projects we want to accomplish on this trip. First, we want to spend time meeting with families in San Pablo and getting to know them and their specific needs. Our hope is that by collecting this data we can begin to get an idea of some of the macro needs of the community and how we can best serve them on future trips. Our plan is also to photograph each family for this database and to have pictures framed as gifts for the family. This may sound silly, but in a poor village most people have few if any family pictures. We think this will be a much-appreciated gift. Our second project is to spend 2-3 afternoons a week with the kids of San Pablo running a soccer camp. This project was what first got me thinking about bringing Ethan. He is excited to help me coach the camp and to get to play soccer with some of the kids from San Pablo. We are extremely grateful to the Colorado Fusion Soccer Club, the club for which Ethan plays and I am a coach, for donating equipment for the camp which we will leave behind as a gift for the children of San Pablo.

We are very excited about this trip and the opportunity to be a part of what God is doing in Guatemala, and we’d like to give you an opportunity to be involved as well. There are two ways you can support what we’re doing:

1. Pray – Though I have traveled extensively, I have to admit some nervousness about taking Ethan to another country. Please pray for my peace of mind and for our protection on the trip. Please also pray for our time in San Pablo and that we would be able to make the most of our time.
2. Give financially – The trip will cost around $1100 for Ethan and I. If you’d like to make a tax-deductible contribution to our trip expenses, you can make out a check payable to “New Denver Church” and send it to our address (email me to get that address) or you can simply click here to donate via PayPal.

Thanks for taking the time to read about our trip. We look forward to sharing more as we go and when we return!

Stephen and Ethan

Ethan has enjoyed a great year of first grade at our neighborhood school, Steele Elementary. It has been amazing to see how much he has learned and grown during this year. His reading, writing, and math skills have continued to get better each week, and he’s shown a lot of enthusiasm for special projects like learning about Australia. In addition to school, Ethan played another season with the Colorado Fusion soccer club. This is his fourth season with this team, and it is fun to see these kids grow together. As they get older we can see their skills and competitive natures growing. Fortunately we have another year in the “developmental” league before we have to step up to the more serious competitive league! Ethan is also playing baseball and really loving it. We think his favorite sport is whichever one he is playing at the moment. Ethan is looking forward to a summer full of camps around Denver and some fun travel to visit family. We also made the decision for Stephen to take Ethan with him on his June trip with New Denver Church to Guatemala. You can read more about that trip in a separate post, but Ethan is so excited to experience travel to another country and experience a whole new culture.

Andrew turned 5 in April and celebrated with a party with friends from school at Chuck-E-Cheese (we hope this is a our last Chuck-E-Cheese birthday party). Andrew was thrilled to have Stephen’s parents here (aka “MaLa and Pop”) for his special day. What’s not to love about a few days of spoiling from your grandparents?! Andrew still doesn’t like school and is glad to remind us of that on Monday, Wednesday and Friday when he goes to pre-kindergarten! Kate took him to a kindergarten open house at the school he’ll be attending this fall and was encouraged that he seemed to enjoy himself. We’re beginning to see he may just be more of a homebody! He is still playing soccer with the Colorado Fusion club, and Stephen is coaching his team again. He has improved this year but still loves snack time after the game way more than the game itself!

Kate continues to be the one to keep our household running and organized. On top of her work with Ronald Blue & Co., she still finds time to make lunches, chaperone field trips, be team mom for Ethan’s soccer team, coordinate our family schedules, and invest in women from our church through a bi-weekly discipleship group. In March she also made time to take the boys to visit her grandmother in Virginia. She’s also been hard at work planning an anniversary trip this fall. On August 24th, Stephen and Kate will celebrate ten years of marriage and are planning a trip to San Francisco and Napa Valley in September. Between now and then Kate will be navigating our family through a summer filled with a complicated maze of summer camps and cross-country trips to visit family too complicated to begin to describe!

Stephen continues to stay busy with a variety of things as well. New Denver Church continues to be the primary passion of his heart, but since he and the other three pastors committed to being bi-vocational since New Denver started, he also has several other things on his plate as well. He let some of his technology consulting contracts expire last fall to commit to being home with Andrew one day a week to give Kate more margin to do her job. But in anticipation of getting that time back this fall, Stephen started doing some small groups coaching for other churches through the Miles Advisory Group. It has been a great experience and seems to be a flexible way to provide more income while serving the wider church. Stephen has also been working with an old friend, Gabe Lyons, and some friends here in Denver to host a local version of the Q Conference that Gabe’s organization puts on every year. This effort is fueled by Stephen’s desire to be part of igniting a movement of churches and Christians around the Denver area to work for the common good of the city. It hasn’t been all work for Stephen as he took some time in March to go with some guys from New Denver down to Arizona to watch some Rockies and Dodgers spring training baseball! Stephen is also looking forward to a busy summer full of exciting projects, including his trip to Guatemala in June (again, for more on that click here) as well as some fun trips to visit friends and family.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. We’re grateful for friends and family who care about us and keep up with what’s happening in our lives. We pray that this update finds you all well. Please reach out and say “hi” or even better – come see us! Denver’s a great place to come visit… ;-)

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, or perhaps gave up all media for Lent (if you did, stop reading this), then you know the sports news cycle has focused an inordinate amount of attention over the last two weeks to where Peyton would go next. All those questions were put to rest this week when it was announced that Peyton and I will soon be neighbors. Well, we’ll at least be living in the same metropolitan area – Denver, Colorado – as Peyton signed a 5-year contract that could be worth up to $96 million dollars. So everyone in Denver is thrilled, right? Well, not exactly.

You see, Denver already has a quarterback. And unless you spent the last six months under the aforementioned rock then you definitely know who he is. Tim Tebow set the sports world on fire last season with his last-minute comebacks and his unabashed commitment to a very public expression of his faith. He took a hapless and hopeless 1-4 Broncos team and by force of will, turned them into a playoff team. It wasn’t pretty, but he won. Moreover he won over the people of Denver, including me. Despite my admiration of his strong faith and character, I was a skeptic of Tebow early on. As one writer put it, “He throws like he’s chucking a ham and runs like he just stole a toaster!” It wasn’t always pretty, but as the season progressed you just couldn’t take your eyes off him. He won me over. He won this city over.

So when the news came that the Broncos were signing Peyton, I wasn’t shocked, but I was a little disappointed. For Tim, sure, but also for myself and other loyal Tebow fans here in Denver. He worked hard. He earned the love of (most of) the fans. He earned the right to lead this team. But when you have the chance to get a hall-of-fame quarterback, you jump on it. I get that. It’s just business, it’s not personal. So why do I feel disappointed? Why are people calling into the Broncos radio show blasting John Elway and the Broncos’ management? If it’s just business, why is everyone so upset? Why are so many people taking it so personally?

The fact is, it is personal. Life is personal. When we say things like “It’s just business” we’re often just trying to make ourselves feel better by justifying a decision that hurts others. Every day people have to make difficult decisions that impact the lives of others, often in very negative ways. These decisions are part of life, and yes they are part of business (and ministry). They cannot be avoided. But let’s not kid ourselves by saying that they’re not personal.

In a conversation with his disciples about the cost of following him, Jesus once asked rhetorically:

What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? (Matthew 16:26)

It’s probably a good question to ask in situations where we feel tempted to tell ourselves “it’s not personal, it’s just business.” Because from the lens of eternity, it seems more likely that we’ll all look back and say “It’s not business, it’s just personal.”

Now I have to admit, I hate the NBA. Ever since the league went from being a team game that highlighted great rivalries between cities to promoting individual players and often glorifying thugs who happened to be good at basketball, I lost interest (somewhere back in the ’90s). But Jeremy Lin quickly caught my interest, not only because he is an incredible Cinderella story, but also because of his outspoken Christian faith. The inevitable comparisons were made to Tim Tebow, but it quickly became apparent that Jeremy Lin is his own person and represents a different perspective on Christianity.

This became apparent to me after reading Michael Luo’s great piece in the NY Times, ‘Lin’s Appeal: Faith, Pride and Points.’ The article is Luo’s intensely personal reflection on how Lin’s success is about so much more than basketball. Luo was the first to open my eyes to how Lin is beautifully representing his faith in a way that is true to his culture and heritage. His success has made Lin the very public face for a vibrant but often overlooked segment of American Christianity, and Keith Bradsher’s piece in the NY Times pointed out, he’s also making waves in China where Christians are still persecuted for their faith.

Then this week I read a great post by Carl Park over on the Gospel Coalition’s blog where he builds on Luo’s reflections on why Asian American Christians are connecting to Lin differently than they have to Tebow. Park does a great job of pointing out that the experience of being an Asian-American Christian is quite different from that of Anglo-American Christians, though that experience is not as widely known. The controversies of the Anglo-American church have not been their controversies. They aren’t experiencing the decline of the broader American church but are actually experiencing vibrant growth. The Asian-American church has an important voice in the conversation about Christianity in America that has been largely unheard. Park’s hope is that Lin-sanity is changing that:

Linsanity, for Asian Americans, is only partly about basketball. More significantly, it’s about that outside experience being recognized by others and, even further, evolving into inclusion. Can what happened to Lin in the NBA happen to him and other Asian American Christians in the broader American church? Can it encourage Asian American Christians to give more of their gifts and leadership to the community—and Community—at large? It sounds grandiose, insane. But, as we’ve seen the last two weeks, insanity happens.

After living in central Asia and eastern Europe for an extended period of time and traveling regularly throughout my life to serve churches around the world, you’d think I would be more consciously aware of the importance of learning about faith from other cultures. But it’s so easy to become ethno-centric – to spend time primarily with people who look and think similarly to you. It’s easy to only hear the loudest voices and assume they represent the whole picture of what God is doing in the American church. But Jeremy Lin has reminded me that even though we share the same citizenship – both on earth and in heaven – we have very different experiences of life and faith. There is much to learn from those who are different from me, but it is easy to forget that. Thanks for the reminder Jeremy Lin.

**Image from Flickr user nikk_la, used under Creative Commons license .

It’s Not About the Lab Rats

If Lance Armstrong went to jail and Livestrong went away, that would be a huge setback in our war against cancer, right? Not exactly, because the ­famous nonprofit donates almost ­nothing to scientific research. BILL GIFFORD looks at where the money goes and finds a mix of fine ideas, millions of dollars aimed at “awareness,” and a few very blurry lines.

The article raised an interesting question that we discussed as a staff: Does contributing to awareness about a need or cause make you feel like you’re helping without actually helping? The article raises disturbing questions of whether we really know where our money goes when we contribute to organizations. Gifford makes the point that most people who buy the little yellow “LiveStrong” bracelets believe that by doing so they are contributing to cancer research and helping to fight cancer. The truth is that none of that money goes to research. While the value of the LiveStrong programs that the money is used for is debatable, the point is that whether or not buying one of those little yellow bracelets actually helps in the fight against cancer is questionable. Yet everyone who has bought one or contributed to LiveStrong did so, because they thought they were helping the cause. And after they had done so they felt like they had helped. So did giving in this way effectively anesthetize them from feeling the need to continue contributing to this need?

These days there are hundreds, probably thousands, of organizations that claim to be working for the common good by addressing the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of our world. The question is, how much of that work is engaging those needs through action and how many are just raising awareness? And at what point does contributing to awareness about an issue make us feel like we’re helping when we really aren’t? Where has our awareness anesthetized us from actively engaging? This conversation helped reinforce our desire at New Denver to develop strong relationships with the people and organizations with whom we partner to contribute to the common good of our community, our city, our country, and the world. We need to make good choices about where we invest our time and resources and ensure that we aren’t just raising awareness about issues but also actively engaging the issues. Awareness is a good thing – a necessary step before engagement. But it’s not the final step.

To close this post I’ll throw out some deeper and more personal questions that this raised for me, and I’ll come back in a later post (more likely a series of posts) to address them. Has the way we’ve presented Jesus and the gospel effectively anesthetized people from discipleship (the process of actively following him with their lives)? By focusing on gathering large crowds to church on Sunday and teaching about Jesus have we raised awareness about him and given people the feeling that they’re following him when they really aren’t? Have we truncated the full message of the gospel into the plan of salvation (read Scot McKnight’s book King Jesus Gospel to understand what I mean by that) and called people to a decision instead of discipleship? Has doing so given them the impression that their journey of faith is complete when in fact they have only taken a first critical step?

Awareness is an important and necessary first step, but it cannot be our last step.

When I look back on my life and journey of faith thus far, it is divided into two parts. In the first half, faith for me was mostly about a decision. The decision was to accept that Jesus’ death on the cross and his subsequent resurrection accomplished something for me. It was about deciding that I believed who Jesus claimed to be and that his sacrifice accomplished something on my behalf that I could not accomplish for myself. I was accepted, loved, and redeemed by God based on what Jesus did. The problem is that for too long, this is where faith ended for me. What I didn’t realize for many years was that the decision I made was a first step not a final step.

When my two boys first learned to walk, they both had a similar experience. Both stood and took faltering first steps before deciding that crawling was way more familiar and comfortable to them. Walking was scary, uneasy and unpredictable. They couldn’t get very far crawling, but they also couldn’t fall down. Crawling was safe and predictable. But you can’t really grow and mature as a human being and insist on continuing to crawl.

In his letter to the church in Galatia, Paul addresses a somewhat similar situation. Having taken their first steps of faith, some were actually going back to crawling:

You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.
Galatians 5:13

Paul sees these new followers of Jesus who have taken their first steps of freedom. They have made a decision to believe in Jesus and to follow him. But Paul also sees that these followers want to stop and rest after taking their first few steps of faith. But he pushes them to keep moving forward:

So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.
Galatians 5:15

So Paul has now contrasted two different ways of life – “indulging the flesh” and “walking by the Spirit.“ Paul goes on in Galatians 5:19-26 to explain more what each of these ways of life look like. To continue my metaphor, indulging the flesh is about continuing to crawl in your familiar habits and ways even after you’ve taken your first steps of faith into a new way of life. Walking by the Spirit, in contrast, is the awkward stumbling-forward process of learning to walk, in the way of Jesus.

But the question still remains – how do you do this? Unfortunately I can’t give you the process or formula (did you read the title of this series?!). What I can give you are the words of Jesus. These words have been immensely helpful for me on many occasions:

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
Matthew 7:7

While there are no formulas, Jesus does give us a process that is helpful in understanding how we can continue taking steps forward, learning to walk in step with the Spirit:

• Ask – God invites us to come to him with our cares, concerns and questions. So take him up on it. Go to God in prayer, ask him for wisdom, for guidance, for strength, for courage, for support. We ask, he gives.
• Seek – This is an invitation to action. Seek people who can guide you in the process. Seek books and resources that provide insight and wisdom. Seek truth, beauty, and justice, knowing that these come from God.
• Knock – Try things, and be willing to fail. The invitation to follow where Jesus leads is an invitation to learn from him. This will not be a perfect process. You will stumble. You will fall. But you never learn if you never try.

I can’t give you a formula or tell you what your journey of walking with God will look like. But I can tell you that God is found by those who seek him, and there is more joy and life in stumbling forward, learning to walk, than there is in going back to crawling. Who knows, we might even move beyond walking one day and actually get the chance to run. That’s something to look forward to.

**Photo from Flickr user cc511, used under Commercial Commons license

In part one of the series I talked about Jesus’ call in Mark 1:15 to “Repent and believe” that the kingdom of God had “come near” or was “at hand.” We really focused in on what it meant to repent – or literally to change your mind. In this second half, I zeroed in on Jesus’ call to “believe” and explored what Jesus meant by that.

The way I think about what it means to “believe” has changed a lot over the years. One great catalyst for thinking about the concept of belief, and the corollary concept of doubt, was a book by John Ortberg entitled Faith and Doubt (available for Kindle or in paperback under the title Know Doubt). In my life I had always thought of belief as a binary concept – you either believe or you don’t. But through reading John’s book and others, my own reflections on Scripture and my own experience of belief, I now think about believing very differently. So what’s changed?

First, I no longer thing of belief as solely or even primarily an intellectual exercise. For most of my life I thought of belief as something that took place in your head, or perhaps if you were acting based on intuition or emotion, your heart. I saw it as a strongly held conviction about something that you believe to be true. While this is an accurate understanding of the concept of belief, it is incomplete. Second, as I mentioned I used to see belief as binary – you either believe or you don’t. Ortberg was the first to help me see that belief is more of a continuum. In Faith and Doubt he describes three types of faith that I would say are actually points along a continuum:

• Public – What we say we believe.
• Private – What we think we believe.
• Core – What we really believe as reflected by our actions.

So our belief in something moves along this continuum – moving from being an intellectual process, something that we say we believe to ourselves and to others, until it comes to fruition in our actions. Our core beliefs are reflected in our actions. All you really believe is what you do. My first attempt at sharing these ideas was in 2011 in the series I did at New Denver entitled Moving Beyond Belief, which was an exploration of the idea of belief through the lens of Paul’s letter to the Colossians. But in this Walking in Circles message I was really able to zero in on Jesus’ call to believe the good news that the kingdom of God is at hand and explore what that means for us who choose to follow.

So when we come to Jesus’ imperative to “believe,” what was he asking us to do? I believe he was calling us to move along that continuum toward a life that reflects a core belief that we can live as part of the kingdom of God. Here. Now. Wherever “here” and “now” happens to be for you. Through the people, circumstances, and events of your life, God is trying to move you further down the continuum of belief. Currently the best paradigm I’ve found for how we practically do that is the learning circle developed by Mike Breen and 3D Ministries.  I talked about the first half of that circle in part one of this series, but I wrap it up here in part 2.

The first half of the circle is the “repent” half. It is about asking the question, “What is God trying to teach or tell me through this kairos moment?” The second half of the circle is the “believe” half. After you have clarified what you believe God is saying or asking you to do, the next question is, “What are you going to do about it?” This comes by walking the second half of the circle:

• Plan – After reflecting on the kairos moments you observe in your life and then discussing it with a trusted friend or group of friends, you need to clarify what it is that you need to do in response to what God has shown you through this moment.
• Accountability – Often in life we know what we need to do but lack the resolve to actually do it. Herein lies the importance of community and making yourself accountable to others. When you share what you believe God wants you to do and what you plan on doing, close friends can offer you the challenge and support to follow through.
• Act – This is where your belief becomes core belief. What you believe in your head and heart becomes action. Be ready, because usually this isn’t the last step. Stepping in faith into the reality of the kingdom often opens new kairos moments as God invites us to experience more of the kingdom as we continue repenting and believing.

If you’d like to listen to the audio of this message it is available online at our website or through our iTunes Podcast.

A little over two years ago I was introduced to a book called Building a Discipling Culture by Mike Breen (hard copy book available from 3DM’s website) which introduces an approach to discipling known as Life Shapes. As someone who has led small groups ministries for over a decade, I’ve seen my share of group models and curricula. But after hearing friends who are pastors in Ecclesia (the church network we’re part of) rave about this book and its intentional approach to making disciples – teaching people to learn to follow Jesus more closely in their everyday lives – I was definitely intrigued. After reading the book, my first thought was, “Is that it?” It seemed too simple. I didn’t see how this approach would be any more effective than any other small group material I had ever seen. I struggled for a year, talking to the most ardent supporters of this approach, trying to understand what was so different about it. They all said the same thing, “You just have to be in a group and experience it to get it.”

Finally in March of last year, thanks to my friend Ben Sternke who is a pastor from our church network, I got the chance to experience a group. That experience more than lived up to the hype. In the four months we spent together as a group, learning this intentional approach to discipleship, I experienced personal growth in my relationship with God and instantly saw the potential inherent in this approach. I have personally adopted the Life Shapes paradigm of spiritual growth and applied it to my own life and spiritual journey. It has also influenced how I lead and guide others that I lead or mentor do the same.

So what made this so different from other groups? First and foremost is the paradigm with which you approach the process: God is already directing and discipling you. The question is, “Are you listening?” In the past I have looked to systems or curriculum to figure out how to help myself and others engage the felt and unfelt spiritual needs of people’s lives. But what if God is already in the process of doing that? What if God is already trying to get our attention and direct our growth through the events, the people, and the circumstances of our lives? What if what we need isn’t more information or talking through curriculum that may or may not address the issues God wants us to address? What if all we had to do was to begin paying attention to what God is already trying to do and responding to him? That is the simplicity and the power behind the Life Shapes approach to discipleship.

Since I finished my group with Ben last summer, I’ve started three different groups based on this approach at New Denver Church. Each one has proven more effective at helping people take real steps of growth in their life and faith in a shorter period of time than any other group approach I’ve ever seen. As a result, the language of Life Shapes has begun to take root at New Denver and become our way of understanding discipleship and spiritual formation. In order to begin disseminating some of that language into New Denver I decided to share the principles behind the core of the Life Shapes approach – the circle.

Last Sunday I taught through the first of a two-part series called Walking in Circles. In this first part we explored Jesus’ call in Mark 1:15 to “repent and believe” by looking at what it means to “repent” or to change your mind about what we experience in life. The process of repenting involves three steps:

Observe - Pay attention to the events of your life and be attuned to possible “kairos” moments that God may be trying to guide or direct you. Here are some questions to help you discern kairos moments in your life:

• What were the high points or the low points (of my day, my week, my month, etc)?
• Where did you experience stress or peace?
• Were there any relational conflicts or tension?
• What do I want the most in life right now?
• Is there something I’m thinking a lot about?

Reflect - Once you have identified the significant “kairos” moments it is important to reflect on those and to seek to understand what God may be trying to teach or tell you through those moments. Here are some questions that may help you:

• Why did I react to that situation in that way?
• What emotion was I feeling in that moment? What does that emotion tell me?
• What is it God may be trying to teach or tell me by bringing this moment to mind?

Discuss – We all need the objectivity of others to help us discern how God may be leading us. Sharing the significant events of your life with others and talking about how you feel God is leading you may help to clarify what your next step should be.

If you’d like to listen to the audio of this message it is available online at our website or through our iTunes Podcast. In my next post I’ll share the second half of the circle and talk about the steps we take to believe that the kingdom of God is present and available to us.

**Thanks to JR Briggs for the circle diagram we used during the series.

At the end of last year I had an experience that led me to begin 2012 by unplugging from some of the technology that saturates my life (read about that decision here). I decided (arbitrarily) to unplug for a week and then evaluate my experience. That week ended yesterday so I’m still processing my reflections from that time, but here are some initial thoughts as I re-connect to my digital world.

1. Unplugging was more difficult than I expected.
   It was more difficult than I expected to decide where I would draw the line around “unplugging.” I decided to try and unplug within the context of a normal week of life and work, and I quickly learned that it was impossible to do my work as a pastor and completely disconnect. I spent hours last week on my computer answering emails, researching for and writing my message for last Sunday at New Denver Church, answering phone calls and responding to text messages. Since I couldn’t fully disconnect, I just decided to eliminate the non-essentials. I didn’t interact with any social media (specifically for me no Facebook or Twitter), no games (not on my iPhone, iPad, or most temptingly, my new XBox 360), no web surfing, no blog reading, and I tried to eliminate television unless watching something with someone in my family. Short of leaving my everyday life and work to pursue a completely disconnected experience (which I would like to do at some point) I think this was about the best I could do at unplugging.
2. Unplugging was easier than I expected.
   The things I gave up I didn’t really miss as much as I thought I would. This was encouraging to me. You never really know how strong a hold things or experiences have on you until you try to give them up. In part, this is the great benefit of practicing the discipline of fasting. We let go of good and permissible things that God has given for our enjoyment as a way of keeping ourselves from making lesser things into more ultimate things. I recognize the power that technology has to draw my attention and affection, and I think I will probably always live somewhere on the continuum between “healthy and appropriate use” and “unhealthy and inappropriate abuse.” It’s good to find myself somewhere on the positive side of that continuum.
3. Social media is mostly a one-sided conversation for me.
   During my hiatus from social media, I was curious to see what, if anything, I missed from the experience. I was surprised that what I missed more than anything was the feeling of sharing my thoughts, observations and experiences to “someone.” As an extrovert I realize that often my thoughts aren’t even real for me until I say them out loud. Social media is a way to do that. So while I guess I hope people will read and interact with what I say, the interaction was not what I missed most. What I missed most was having a way to express myself and feel heard, whether someone actually reads what I say or not.
4. My family appreciated the effort.
   One of the main reasons I wanted to disconnect from part of my digital life was that I have seen how it can affect my focus and attention on the people in my embodied life. I’m not sure those words (digital vs embodied) are the best way to describe the experience of my life, but I prefer that paradigm better than others (e.g. virtual vs. real). The point is that as much as I try to multi-task or to have my attention focused into my digital and my embodied world, I don’t do it well. It has often created frustration for Kate (and to a lesser degree my kids) when my focus is into my digital world (staring at my phone, computer, iPad, etc) instead of on them. Kate mentioned on a couple occasions how she appreciated this exercise.
5. Distractions are found in all forms of “technology.”
   One interesting discovery was that even if I take away my technological distractions (phone, computer, television) there are lower forms of technology that I still used to distract myself. For example, I took my son Andrew to lunch last week, and I took a magazine with me. While no one would probably refer to a magazine as a piece of “technology” it served as a distraction for me. I could have chosen to simply sit and watch Andrew play or to just sit and think. Instead I chose to sit and read. This disconnected me from my embodied world and connected me to a print world. So the dangers of distraction aren’t limited to shiny tech gadgets.

There’s more than I could say about the experience, but I’ll close by saying that I found this to be a very worthwhile exercise. So I’ll close with a question for you as you read this. Is there anything good but lesser thing in your life that you may be making an ultimate thing? Maybe it’s time to take a break to find out what you might learn by paying more attention to your embodied world.

** Image from Flickr user kozumel, used under Creative Commons license.

When we got to the mall my worst fears were realized. It was a complete madhouse. I have never seen that many people at a mall in my life. Seriously. Every road was jammed. Every parking spot was full. Every parking-lot aisle was backed up three to four cars deep as people were “trolling” for parking spots. I reached for my phone to call the store where we were heading to find out if they even had the item we came after. Oh yeah, no phone today.

After circling the parking lot without success for thirty minutes I heard the words from our back seat that every parent dreads in situations like this: “Daddy, I have to go potty.” It was Andrew, my four-year-old. “Okay, just hold it for a few minutes. Daddy will get a parking spot soon.” Fifteen minutes later Andrew was crying, and we still hadn’t found a parking place. I made a split-second decision. Passing the main entrance to the mall (in bumper-to-bumper traffic) I opened the door and instructed my seven-year-old son, Ethan, to take his brother inside to the bathroom and told him exactly where to wait for me inside. I headed straight for the valet parking line. At this point seven dollars seemed like a small price to pay to retrieve my two boys who were somewhere in the middle of the mall madness. As I dropped off my car, I began praying that the boys made it to the bathroom okay, that they weren’t scared, and that they’d be right where I told them to be. I was speed walking to where I told Ethan to meet me, and as I walked my hand slipped to my pocket. Oh yeah, no phone today. I continued to pray. I opened the door to the mall and immediately saw my boys, exactly where I told them to wait. I prayed again, thanking God for this small but oh-so-important answered prayer.

The mall was as insane inside as it was outside. Every seat in the food court was full, and people huddled in corners to eat. Madness, total madness. We made it to our destination, the Lego store, to find that, sure enough, they did not have the one thing we came after. After finding a suitable substitute (what four-year old is willing to wait?) we headed out. I had promised the boys lunch at Chick-Fil-A, but the food court was still packed so I decided we’d just head to a different location as far away from this mall as we could get. As we walked out through the food court, I reached down to snap a pic with Instagram and tweet it. Oh yeah, no phone today.

We finally made it out of the mall parking lot (another prayer of thanks was offered) and headed to Chick-Fil-A. We finished lunch, and the boys headed to the play area. This is a familiar ritual for me with my boys – fast food lunch followed by play time for them and some time to read, browse the web, and surf social networks for me. I reached for my pocket. Oh yeah, no phone today. For the first time in a while, I had a chance to just sit. And to think.

As I thought about my day, I noticed that more than my phone was missing from the day. A lot of my usual anxiousness and frustration was gone. I was more patient with my boys than I usually am. Given the unusually stressful nature of my day that was surprising. As I thought about it, I thanked God for that extra measure of grace, but I also began to wonder what else was different. I realized that I was fully present in every moment of that day without any distractions or diversions.

As a person who has spent much of his life working with technology (both as a vocation and an avocation), I spend a lot of time “plugged in.” But as a pastor, I’ve also thought a lot about how technology influences us. I am grateful in this regard to a pastor from Michigan named Shane Hipps. Shane wrote a great book a few years back that I highly recommend entitled Flickering Pixels which is an excellent exploration of the unintended consequences of media and technology. If reading a book on the topic seems too large a task and you’d prefer something shorter (which is true for most of us…technology, the internet specifically, did that to us) there’s a great article on Shane’s blog that should get you thinking.

I love technology, but I realize that using it as frequently as I do has unintended consequences. The best way that I’ve found to combat these consequences is to unplug – to fast from technology. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, and my experience at the mall made me realize it’s time to do it again. So I’m going to spend the first week of 2012 “unplugged.” No Twitter. No Facebook. No web surfing. No non-work-related email. I’ll probably still carry my phone in order to be available in my role as a pastor, but I intend to use it as little as possible. I want to create some silence and thought margin, some room to listen.

I’ll be back in a week – hopefully with more to say than if I hadn’t taken this break.