Unplugging the Info-Tech God

Sep 1, 2010
Joe Carter

I never find the time to be alone with God during the week, so I’ve dedicated this Sunday afternoon to prayer. But before I do I should check my e-mail so I won’t be distracted. It won’t take long before. . . Thirty-two new messages, including one from the boss? I better reply right now. They might be important.

Some invitations from Facebook. Those are easy to clear out so let me accept them and I’m . . . hmm, I didn’t realize I had more notifications. Looks like Stacy finally launched a blog; I’ll just click through really quickly to check it out. Some great stuff. I really should add her blog to my RSS reader before I forget. What, “More than 100+ items”? Didn’t I just check this yesterday? I should really whittle these down a bit before it gets worse.

Wow, here I was about to focus on prayer and Bible study and my favorite theology-blogger has an excellent post on spiritual disciples. I have to share that with my own blogreaders. That’s a topic that’s really on my heart today, and it won’t take long. the rest

We consider it peculiar that Muslims stop five times a day to offer prayers to Allah, yet we stop what we do five times an hour to pay homage to our e-mail. “One of the most basic biblical insights,” says theologian J.I. Packer, “is that whatever controls and shapes one’s life is in effect the god one worships.” For many of us, the one true god to whom we give our devotion is the deity known as IT: information technology.