Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: To supplant what God created, the relationships we were meant to have with one another. Any other thoughts about that article? Things that filtered to the top for you?
One of my favorite parts of the article was his emphasis on limitations that God gave us and how those limits are good and valuable things. The limitations of time, space, and matter that we feel as as so oppressive are actually gifts given to us for our good. And as we attempt to overthrow those limitations, it costs us something. It costs us something about our humanity.
I hope that reading that article helped you understand the teaching we had on time over the past two weeks, and I hope it helped prepare you for our discussion on space today.
Just like God provided time, and just like God provided time in order to order the progress of our lives, he provided us with space to organize and shape how we inhabit the world around us Two months ago my family went on vacation to the uk, to the Codswolds, those iconic English rolling hills.
It was beautiful. If you climb to the top of a particularly tall hill in the Codswolds and you look out, you will see that the countryside is separated into all these neat little divisions.
There are some fields, some forests, and some of those fields are set apart for growing crops, while others are set apart for raising sheep or cattle. The Codswolds have clearly been cultivated by humans for centuries, and going there felt a bit like going into the past.
Every few miles throughout those hills sits a little village.
Many of those villages are still made up primarily by the historic homes that have been there for hundreds of years.
While I was there, I could not help but think about what life would have been like there before the advent of modern technology.
Imagine with me what living in the codswolds in the 1400s might have been like.
You live on a small farm nestled about three miles from the nearest village.
That village operates as a center of community, with the farmers in about a six mile radius treating that town as the center of community occasionally making their way there for market.
You didn't make the trek every day, but thankfully you were close enough to town that you would head in about once or twice a week. Some of your old friends lived a bit further out near the six mile edge of this extension community.
Traveling back and forth 12 miles round trip in a day was really taxing for them, and it was done only rarely, every other week or so. You always hoped that your day traveling in lined up with theirs, but too often you missed each other for one reason or another.
According to one historian, most people in the codswolds throughout the 1400s interacted with less than 200 other people every year.
And interactions were largely controlled by distance.
You saw your nearest neighbors all the time, but your friend on the edge of the community was difficult to see, even though they lived only about six miles away.
You have seen more people this morning than many people in the Codswolds saw for an entire year.
Their world was small, and because of that they knew that world very well.
Another historian explained that the villagers good neighborliness arose because of the very inevitability of their daily contact.
They knew each other well because they had no other choice.
They could not drive away or hop on a phone. They were stuck with those 200 people and they had to learn how to live with them.
Compare this scene to our lives now.
When my family and I left the Codswolds, we traveled about six hours by car to Wales to the mountain of Snowdon, a distance that would have confounded and amazed our ancestors.
About 20 minutes into this six hour car ride, I heard the dreaded words from my son in the backseat, Are we there yet?
How much longer till we are there?
I am bored.
For better or worse, our solution to this was to let Bennett watch his favorite movie, Cars 2, on a little digital tablet. And instantly that digital portal transported his mind out of the boring car and into the exciting world of talking animated cars. In the span of an afternoon, Bennett traveled farther than our ancestors could have imagined, something he found to be boring.
And throughout the trip, his mind wasn't even tied to the vehicle as it drove from point A to point B. Aaron and I likewise sent emails and messages all throughout this trip to friends on the other side of the world. We facetimed my parents that evening.
Our experience of space has changed.
Think with me for a second about space as a concept.
As we experience it. Space has three dimensions. Up and down, side to side, front to back. Moving along these dimensions shifts us from place to place.
Space is what divides the world into these various places.
Humans and other creatures only ever occupy one space at a time, and this provides us with a specific context so that we don't have to react to all of reality simultaneously.
You are here in this room, and so am I. And so we are interacting together.
This is the structure of our reality, seemingly so obvious as to go without mentioning.
But as Jason often says, it is those things that go unsaid which often go forgotten.
So today we will remember space together.
And as we begin, I want to do some review and remind you of where we are at in this class in week one, John introduced us to the concept of a meaning making story, which we defined as an account knowingly or tacitly believed that tells us what reality is, why it matters, and how we should relate to it. This story defines what is good, true and beautiful, and it shapes the way we live with God, each other, and the world.
In week two, I propose that the digital ecosystem we are beginning to inhabit is tacitly drawing us into a new story of life. It does this by offering us a path toward transcendence. A tower to the heavens to help us make a name for ourselves.
It reshapes our experience of time, space and matter. It steals our attention away from God, each other, and the real world.
As we look at Genesis 1 this morning, I hope to explore four reasons why we may not want to let our experience of space shift too far.
We begin with Genesis 1. 1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Over the past two weeks we looked at how in the beginning marks the start of time.
This week we note how God created the heavens and the earth marks the beginning of space, which leads us to point 1.
Space gives definition to reality.
Space is a created thing. God did not have to create space the way he did, but the creation of space allows for naming distinct places, the heavens and the earth. Two spaces corresponding with two separate purposes. I could speak of the Codswolds a moment ago because all of us understand the concept of space, that the Codswolds are a different place than London, a different place than North Carolina.
In the two terms, the heavens and the earth, we have the summation of reality itself, with the heavens representing multiple spaces, both the sky above the earth as well as the spiritual place where God dwells, a place beyond place.
This simple organizational distinction has implications all throughout the rest of Scripture.
Take, for example, one of the most famous stories in the Bible, the Tower of Babel, which involves humans resisting this first and most basic distinction.
Then the people of Babel said, come, let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves.
Otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.
In reaching for the heavens, these humans were resisting God, which was of course futile. Even with all of their lofty ambitions, their tower was so far from the heavens that God had to come down to see the city. In the tower which the children of man had built.
You can almost hear a kind of mockery in the account.
They were like children playing with blocks.
My two little boys loved playing with blocks.
They love building things. My older son loves building things, and my younger son loves knocking over whatever he has built.
And in general, we love letting our boys build things.
At least most of the time.
Earlier this week, my boys were on the back porch together when I heard my older son begin encouraging his younger brother, you can do it, Jamie.
I believe in you.
While these words may sound nice, I was immediately concerned.
Bennett rarely encourages James like that, and in my experience, he typically does it when James is engaged in some kind of dangerous activity that seems exciting to Bennett. So I hurried to my back porch only to find that my boys had stacked a little side table that rocks on top of one of those glider seats, one of the ones that rocks back and forth. And James had gotten on top of the glider and had a piece of chalk in one hand and had the other foot up on top of that side table as the glider rocked back and forth.
I was concerned.
At this point I had to remind my boys of one of our house rules. They are not allowed to stack furniture up like little blocks.
They might not understand the danger that climbing on an unstable shaking tower poses, but of course we do, and we've made that rule for their own good.
In a similar way, I want to suggest that God's division of reality into defined spaces is for our good and should not be resisted.
And the rest of the Genesis account emphasizes this. In verse 2, the account zooms in on the earth and tells us that the earth was without form and void. These two words in Hebrew, tohu and bohu, are notoriously hard to translate. Without form and void is a fine translation, but can be pretty abstract and hard to picture. So consider these other translations as well.
Wild and waste, welter and waste, or unfinished and unfurnished.
I want you to zero in on the word welter here.
If you are anything like me when I first heard that word, it is about as foreign to you as the original Hebrew, but once you know what it means, it is a near perfect translation of Tohu. Welter means a large confusing and disorganized mass jumble or number of things, as well as a state of turmoil or upheaval.
Picture your family car after a cross country road trip with your little children. The discarded fries have made their way into every nook and cranny, trash is stuffed in all of the various cup holders and pockets, and there are shoes in random places throughout the car.
It is a mess. And this is what reality was like in Genesis 1:2 before God organized the mess.
So point two space organizes reality into places.
The first three days of creation involve God dividing space to organize this welter into something more orderly. On the first day, we see that God separated the light from the darkness. This separation gave distinction and definition to reality. God called the light day, and he called the darkness night.
God goes on in day two to separate the sky from the water. And in day three, he further separates that water from the land.
Over these two days, God defines and names all of these distinct places.
The sky he calls the heavens, and the dry land he calls the earth. The water he calls the sea.
And once he has created these places, he fills them with vegetation.
Do you see what's happening here?
In the first three days of creation, God is creating habitats or homes for his creations to live in. When Aaron and I first moved into our house here in Raleigh, we needed to fill it with furniture to make it into a home.
Throughout these three days, God first builds a house for his creatures, and he then furnishes that house with the vegetation that they need to live.
By the end of day three, God has taken the earth from a chaotic mixture, a mess of land, water, and air hospitable for no one, to a set of defined spaces, each one hospitable for a different kind of creature.
Which, of course, leads us to point three.
Places allow for creatures to flourish.
Days four to six of the creation account actually mirror the first three days.
On day four, we see God create the sun, the moon, and the stars. These are the celestial bodies that will live in the place he made on day one, namely the day and the night.
On day five, God said, let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.
These are the places that God crafted in day two. And they become the home in which these creatures can flourish and reproduce.
And finally, on day six, God creates land, animals and humans to inhabit the dry ground, the home he crafted for them on day three.
This is the whole structure of God's creation account. He creates places before creatures because the creatures need those places to live.
Of course, the very pinnacle of this pattern plays out with humanity, because God does not just place humans on any piece of dry ground. He places Adam and Eve in a garden.
We're told in Genesis 2 that the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground, the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.
God made us a home, a specific place, a garden. He didn't only provide the food we needed, he also made sure that our home was beautiful.
He then placed Adam and Eve in this garden, and he charged them to work it and keep it and to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it.
These two commands put together have some striking implications.
God had made the garden local, he calls it in the east. But he gave Adam and Eve a global mission.
Just like God had organized reality to make a home for Adam and Eve, they were tasked with continuing to organize reality to make homes for others.
If you work in real estate, which it seems like half of our church does, you should take some joy in this. God's first command to humanity was to build a more beautiful and organized world to carry forward the work he began for us to transform more of the world into a garden.
This is about more than just physical space, of course.
God walked with Adam and Eve in the garden.
As John Yates said to me earlier this week, if rest is when we meet God, the garden is where we meet Him.
But as we know, sin enters the picture and messes things up, which leads us to point 4.
Sin displaces us or drives us towards welter.
When Adam and Eve sinned, their primary punishment was being exiled from the garden, the home God had made for them. They lost this home because they chose to reject God's boundary. And so they are put outside the boundary of God's garden. The physical boundary of the garden is representative of God's moral boundary. Throughout the rest of the Old Testament, this same rule applies. The promise of once again being in God's presence animates so much of the story.
Abraham is promised a land for him and his descendants, a land that is later described as being well watered everywhere, like the garden of the Lord.
To the people of Israel, God promises, in this land I will make my dwelling among you, and I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you shall be my people.
The reference to Eden could not be clearer. We see throughout the Old Testament repeatedly that when the people of Israel disobey God, the place that they had been given experienced famine or war or disease or turmoil. The place became less like the garden and more welter.
Jeremiah, when passing judgment on the people of Israel, describes the promised land with the very words of Genesis 1:2.
I looked on the earth and behold it was without form and void for the church. Today we know that our promised land is not on this earth.
We are pilgrims still longing for Eden, bound to a world that is in the bondage of corruption.
But central to our gospel hope is that one day our Savior will bring us to a place even better than Eden ever was.
While scripture begins in a garden, it ends in a garden city place.
Our experience of space is important. All throughout scripture it is clear that humans were made for space, and we are meant to thrive in a place that is not welter.
But the digital world is allowing us unprecedented freedom to tinker with our experience of reality, to tinker to make small changes to something, especially in an attempt to repair it or improve it.
I do want to make a quick side note that I know some of this tinkering is wonderful. For example, my parents don't live in Raleigh, and the digital world lets me call them and talk to them far more regularly than I ever could otherwise.
This is a blessing, and it's a blessing many of us experience with the digital world.
There are countless other wonderful ways for the digital to be used.
But while we tinker with reality using digital technology, the digital world has begun tinkering with us as well.
It is shifting how we inhabit space.
Think with me about the term digital space.
It's a pretty common term these days, but digital space is very unlike physical space.
Your phone is is fundamentally a node that has practically no space between it and every other node on the digital world. My phone is not separated in the flow of information from your phone. In this way, your phone is like a window, one that you can see and hear through that allows you to peer into digital space.
But what really are you peering into?
Where, I might ask, is the Internet?
Does anyone have an idea where the Internet is?
You might answer some data centers somewhere, but you're not sure which parts of the Internet are in which data centers.
You might say the Internet is everywhere because it follows me everywhere. And you might accurately say the Internet is nowhere because it doesn't occupy space.
The Internet's physicality is totally foreign to us.
We use words that sound as if it is real space when we describe the digital because our minds need space to understand what's going on.
We say our pictures are in the cloud, whatever that means.
We say that we are going online.
We say that we are on Facebook.
But the Internet has no up and down. There's no right or left. It has no landmarks by which we might navigate it. In fact, navigating involves nothing spatial at all. We don't move on the Internet, even though we call it surfing.
We type, we click, and we input information.
But the world of the Internet is all jumbled together without any Spatial distinctions.
I would argue it is like a welter, a jumbled reality. A mess of information and misinformation. Anger and fear, angst and lust.
You may be able to avoid seeing some of it, but you are never far away from is always in your pocket. Just a glance or a notification away.
An ad came out about five days ago from Apple Advertising, their newest product.
And we are going to watch the ad.
Take a look at how this ad promotes the device they are selling to you. And think, how is space being changed by this video?
I need the bathroom.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: There's one downstairs.
[00:22:22] Speaker A: Fine.
[00:22:25] Speaker B: Who keeps touching this?
[00:22:26] Speaker A: You promised French toast, bruh. I'm not your bruh, bruh. Promises were made, Vincent. Fine.
Hey, Siri, did you find the French toast recipe that mom sent?
[00:22:35] Speaker B: I found a message from mom with a link to a French toast recipe from Taste of Home.
Gross. Bet you didn't know that French toast isn't actually French. Yeah, right.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: Then why is it called French, genius?
[00:22:47] Speaker B: Fine. Live in ignorance poll, please.
[00:22:50] Speaker A: Sirius. French toast.
[00:22:51] Speaker B: French.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: No.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: French toast is not originally from France.
What was that?
[00:22:55] Speaker A: It's literally in the name.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: Whatever, Bruno. Makes no sense.
Hey, who canceled Harper's ride? Uh, I cancelled it.
Oh, I'm gonna walk today. Boyfriend.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: What?
[00:23:09] Speaker B: Sorry. Something throat.
It's for you.
Hello?
Tomorrow?
[00:23:18] Speaker A: Besides dad, we're a bit busy now.
[00:23:21] Speaker B: What's with the beers? We don't like the beer. Never do. Hey, has anyone seen my keys? No, haven't seen him. He looks like that. I thought we hate.
[00:23:28] Speaker A: Hey, good pep talk, guys. I'll call you from the car.
[00:23:31] Speaker B: Love ya. Hey. Bye. Bye. Carlo's late. Siri, ping my keys. Hang in your keys.
Okay. Don't say a word.
Beth. Guy, your five minute warning was ten minutes ago.
Is anyone else cold in here? Don't know what you're talking about.
I knew it. What?
Becca, we're late. Come right here, mom. Breathe.
[00:24:12] Speaker A: So good.
[00:24:16] Speaker B: Who's that? Uh, that's asa.
[00:24:18] Speaker A: Who's asa?
[00:24:19] Speaker B: He's a person.
Guys, children.
Not cool,
[00:24:38] Speaker A: Mom.
[00:24:39] Speaker B: Bruno, we have to go now. Like now. Now. Get your bag.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: Bex. We gotta go too.
[00:24:43] Speaker B: You ready?
[00:24:44] Speaker A: Only a body.
[00:24:45] Speaker B: Can I drive your car?
[00:24:46] Speaker A: Uh, no.
[00:24:50] Speaker B: Good morning.
Good morning.
See you tonight. Come.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: Hey, Siri, what's on the calendar tonight?
[00:25:03] Speaker B: You have couples ice skating lessons from 8 to 9pm tonight.
[00:25:07] Speaker A: Hey, hon, can we talk?
Yeah.
That ad came out literally five days ago as I was preparing for this and it felt a bit too providential not to play.
So what did you see about space and how space was impacted by this little device that they had in their kitchen, or how their. Maybe a way to think of it is how was their kitchen changed by the existence.
It became welter. It was a welter in there, wasn't it? It was wild.
It was only a three minute ad and it felt like so much happened.
Other things that changed about space in
[00:25:51] Speaker B: there,
[00:25:54] Speaker A: there was no space. There was no distance between where that kitchen existed and people calling in and the rest of life pressing in.
It wasn't a kitchen where you kind of eat food and cook food. It became a kitchen where everything happens all at once. Everything that can press in, presses in simultaneously.
Anything else you notice?
Yes.
Yeah. There was a web and the web went from like people to device, device to people, people to device, device to people. Yeah.
Yes. They use language that we would. Our most dear language for spaces home to describe what this thing is, which again, actually your iPhone does as well. Your iPhone has a home screen. It's stealing language.
[00:26:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: The device is going to fix the welter. The device is going to fix the welter is what it claims. And actually, functionally, it kind of fixes some of the welter, but in the process it changes reality such that more welter presses in. It has a false promise that it doesn't carry out. And they even put it in the ad. Like the ad was so chaotic, but it's promising to make your life less chaotic.
Seems like they found out about each other through the device. Yes.
Yep. The digital device began mediating reality to them and began mediating each other to them as an extension.
Oh, one more. Yeah.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: They look at each other in confusion.
[00:27:38] Speaker A: Yes.
No. They almost need the digital to become a translation tool for them, describing what the other people are doing and why they're doing it. And they keep track of people through this digital platform because people become confusing in the midst of this incredible welter that they're in.
If you're anything like me, it seemed a little bit dystopian that those people paid so much attention to a screen that they stopped paying attention to each other.
The digital is doing a lot of things to our experience of space, but I want to look at just two of them today.
First, the digital blurs the organization of space and thus the definition of places.
God created space and he used it to define reality.
The digital actively unmakes the very characteristics of space that make it so effective at defining reality for us.
Think with me about how the walls in your house are supposed to work. Your bedroom is for sleeping and the walls keep out the noise. And the light. This allows for the kitchen to be used for eating, even if late at night, while others are sleeping. The office is the place where you work. And having your work remain in the office should allow you to leave that work behind when you sleep or when you cook.
The walls of your house separate out the functions of different spaces. In this way, your walls mirror what God did in the first three days of creation. They put this here and that there. But in the digital world, with a small portal in the middle of your kitchen, every space inside becomes inside of that one space. Every space collapses. The world creeps in in the kitchen, well, it loses its purpose in the midst of gaining every other purpose.
If your work lives on a screen, which in turn lives in your pocket, there is never a room in your house where you are not at work.
You used to be away from your TV when you left the den and away from the telephone when you left the kitchen.
Now they go where you go. A free day at home will turn your bedroom into an office. And a free hour between meetings out and about will will turn your car into the same.
There is never a place where you disconnect from work.
Consider how this connects to the flow of information.
For most of human history, news took time to arrive, and the amount of time it took depended on how far away that news was coming from. This reality meant that people knew the most about the things nearest to them, and that happened to be the thing they could do anything about.
I said earlier in the talk that space, as God made it, means that we don't have to react to all of reality at once. That's one of the characteristics of space, because we are not in all places at all times.
That still holds true to some level, but we are starting to experience a larger slice of reality as our phones get better and better at transmitting information to us rapidly. And no matter where you go, the news that follows you is sure to remind you of of every horrible thing going on across the entire globe.
And because you are a decent human being, you don't like all those horrible things that are happening. It appalls you. You can't believe what you are reading and how horrible those people are. That war is a tragedy and those kids need protection.
Before you know it, you've begun thinking about tragedies on the other side of the world more often than you think about your neighbor down the street who just lost her husband and is feeling alone. The major difference is that the space between you and the other side of the world is still a real Constraint you can't do anything about. That tragedy you can just read about is a false transcendence of space. And it lulls us into an odd kind of hopeless laziness, one that is very passionate about the problems we perceive in the world, but nonetheless crippled by a sense of helplessness, as if the problems are too big for us to deal with.
And the truth is, they are.
We were never made to deal with all the problems across the globe simultaneously. We were made to be faithful with the place God has given us.
The problems near us may not seem as significant, and we of course, should send aid to those in need in whatever way we can and can actually make a difference.
But we shouldn't spend more time thinking about distant problems than we actually spend addressing local ones. And this is the first thing that the digital is doing to space. It is the reverse of days one to three of creation.
God made the world livable by dividing it. And the screen is uniting all space back into a welter of our own making.
Which leads us to point 2.
The digital displaces us and empties real space.
The old sci fi stories imagined the future wrong.
They imagined that we would discover faster ways of moving our bodies, that we would have spaceships, flying cars and teleporters, things that get us places quicker.
But that is not what we have gotten.
Our bodies move about as fast as they did in the 1960s, but we now have a medium that moves information at the speed of light.
And it brings distant people and things to us by removing what stands in between us.
As Anton Barbica puts it, the digital does not propel you into the world, it propels the world into you.
Think about what this does to physical spaces. Most of the places in our lives used to be held together by necessity. You went to the bank because that's where the money was. That's where you had to deposit things.
You went to the shop because that's where food was.
Spaces had roles in your life, and people shared those spaces week after week, whether they felt like it or not. Over the years, that kind of habitual connection produced community.
Going somewhere in person meant that other people had some level of claim on you, at least as long as you were going to remain polite.
You can't just slip out of a conversation in person whenever you want. You have to find a way to exit that conversation. Well.
You have to deal with the people who happen to be in a space. You don't just get to pick and choose whoever you want to be there.
But online, you can withdraw at any point.
Nothing holds you in a conversation. You can be texting one minute and simply drop off that conversation.
But this convenience that we learn to choose over the hard work of relationships will rob us of community.
Is it any surprise we are in a loneliness pandemic?
The more we customize who we deal with and when, the weaker our relationships will be. Because the less I am obliged to others, the less they are obliged to me.
In C.S. lewis's book the Great Divorce, he writes a fictional account that begins in a place he calls the Grey Town.
And the Grey Town has some odd characteristics. The first thing to know is that in the Grey Town, nobody needs anything.
Everyone can get whatever they want just by imagining it. You can get your favorite books or your favorite food, your favorite car.
He even writes, you only have to think of a house and there it is.
Sounds like a great place, right?
But because of this feature and the sinful people who live there, he says that whenever someone gets in a fight with their neighbor, they simply think of moving, and they do so the town keeps spreading out because everyone keeps taking the path of convenience. Why work through a quarrel with your neighbor when you can simply think yourself away from them? Each resident keeps choosing the selfish and easy way out, and they ultimately end up alone.
Lewis tells us that old residents are so far apart that it took two men 15,000 years to reach the nearest one.
And when they got there, they found Napoleon pacing alone in a lit house with nothing near it, muttering over and over again that it was all somebody else's fault.
If you can't tell by now, Louis is providing a creative representation of hell.
The Grey Town has all the conveniences you might want, but the people there had been handed over to their selfish desires. The constraints of reality had been removed, and that led them to a bondage fueled by convenience, which just increased their isolation.
Have you ever tried the app nextdoor?
It advertises itself as a cure for not knowing your neighbors, but it actually operates as a feed of information.
Lost pets, babysitter requests, safety alerts, things for sale.
This is the digital version of community, an aggregate of information curated for individual convenience, something that makes it easier to avoid anyone who doesn't line up with your current interests.
It transforms us from neighbors into consumers.
God's work in Genesis was in part about creating habitats so that creatures could flourish. The digital world is offering us a competing habitat, but it is one in which humans will not flourish if we are not careful.
God made space for us to have defined places, and the digital is connecting every space to collapse them together so we are never actually where we are. This is the train ride where you look around and everyone is on their phone. This is the coffee shop where every person is on their laptop and is absent even while present.
This is the kitchen where every person mediates their life through the digital portal that has demolished the walls that once defined the room.
This makes relationship hard, both our relationships with others and with God.
And so this week I have some homework for you, some very practical homework to end the note on Think about a space in your house and before you leave today.
Designate that space as a digital free zone.
Commit to not bringing your phone or any other digital device into that space. Allow that space to remain, well, just that space.
Ideally, this would be your bedroom for sleep or your dining room for meals. But you of course know your schedule and routine best.
Try to read your Bible in this digital free space and take note of what this does for you.
I'm also going to be trying it out this week and I will report back next week. I haven't done this, but I think it's a worthwhile experiment for us to see if we can reclaim a small bit of space to be free of the digital Let me pray for us and let you all go.
Father, we love you. We thank you for your many good gifts.
We thank you for space, even if it feels like a constraint.
We thank you that you have given us, God, a place to be. We pray that we would grow to love the reality you've given us and that we would not try to overthrow it with a reality of our own making.
Love you. We pray for these things in your name. Amen.
Thank you all.
