Life is full of surprises. If we don’t tune in sometimes, we could miss them.
Being a child of the eighties, I had a Walkman. Remember those? Mine was bright yellow. It held a cassette tape. Remember those? My sister and I had chores we had to do on the weekends like vacuuming, mopping and dusting and I would put in a tape, put on those headphones and get done in no time. There was a certain freedom in tuning out.
Fast forward to 2014 and tuning out is more normal than tuning in. The Walkman has been replaced by the iPod and that’s just the beginning. Due to our smartphones, we have constant entertainment, from games like Flappy Bird, to social media like Facebook and Twitter, not to mention we can watch movies and television shows, 24/7. With all of this tuning out, when exactly, do we tune in?
Until a couple of years ago, every time I exercised, I had the ear buds in and the tunes turned up. Thanks to iTunes, I could download any song I wanted from any decade, and I did. Then one day, my iPod was dead and I had to walk without it. I was not a happy camper, but I learned something.
By tuning out, I was really missing the world around me, the trees in bloom, the birds singing, the hawk soaring overhead. I started walking in silence and God started speaking to me. So, I started cleaning the house in silence too. Guess what? God started speaking to me then, too.
We are so rarely silent these days. We have constant entertainment at our fingertips. Why in the world would we want to be alone with our thoughts?
When we take the youth from church camping, they are never allowed to bring electronics. Do you think they are bored? Nope. They have a ball. They interact. They make up games. It’s so much fun to watch them. They rarely even complain about not having electronic entertainment.
And with our newest friend on the block, Instagram, we have become more obsessed with everyone else knowing that we are having fun, than actually having fun. Does anyone else see the irony here?
Don’t get me wrong, I think the new age of electronics is great. I was very late to the smart phone party and I’ll have to admit that I love my little Droid, but sometimes it belongs in a drawer. When my children are trying to talk to me, or for that matter, when anyone is trying to have a real-life, face-to-face conversation, the Droid goes away.
People are more important than electronics or cyberspace and I hope I’m teaching my children the same. Think about it, if we ignore people standing right in front of us, how can we possibly hear God’s voice?
I believe our need for constant entertainment can become addictive, at least for me. I have to set some boundaries for myself and just turn it off, so I can tune in. If we are always tuned out, we may miss something important.
I want to try to catch every drop of meaning and beauty that life has to offer and so sometimes I have to unplug. Care to join me? What do you think about unplugging? I’d love to hear from you.
Have an awesome day!
Wendy 🙂