Love Your Neighbor in the New Year: Answer Their Emails and Texts

By amazon Wednesday, January 8, 2020 Comment Edit

Jesus protected his time and also gave it up willingly. In this digital age, we’re called to do the same.

When a technological wave crests, I’m not usually riding it. I’m in favor of reading, not binge-watching; dinner parties, not Google hangouts. I was late to own a smartphone and join Facebook, and I still don’t use Instagram. Embarrassingly, I have to call my teenagers to turn on the TV.

Since I’m a Luddite, you might expect me to pen the familiar essay arguing for less technology use rather than more. But this is not that piece. Although a lot of people are resolving (rightly) to curb their digital addictions in this new year, many of us might need an urging in the other direction. The most virtuous among us might not be those who conspicuously publicize their return to various forms of analog life. Instead, those most like Jesus might be the ones who decide to become more digitally available, not less.

Few of us want to hear the call to more digital “dirty work,” but nonetheless, answering texts, emails, and direct-contact messages (from Slack and other apps) is one of the ways that we follow the biblical commandment to “love our neighbors as ourselves.” These invasive messages are grueling to deal with, and though I might prefer a return to a world where the phone actually rang, that is not the world I inhabit.

As I watch public figures make choices about their digital lives, I sometimes have a cynical response when I hear them eschew the burdens of certain technologies. I wonder who carries the real weight of their monastic choices and whom their unreachability is meant to serve. I’m thinking of the megachurch pastor who answers his email once a week and whom no one, outside his family, can reach by text. I think of his administrative assistant, and even his wife, who ...