What Do You Lift Up?: A Pastor’s Reflection on Phones and the Lenten Season
“If you order up coffee on a mobile app while scrolling your social feeds or can't stop watching videos and reading news articles on your phone at bedtime, listen up! Researchers studied what happened when people agreed to block the internet from their smartphones for just two weeks. And turns out, 91% felt better after the break.”
That is the start of an article I heard on NPR this week. Go ahead, dismiss it. Go ahead and say it’s an overreaction by an old guy. Go ahead and say that’s just PT back on his soap box. Or you can read on.
"What we found was that people had better mental health, better subjective well-being and better sustained attention," says Adrian Ward, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. The researchers included 467 participants, ages 18 to 74, who agreed to the month-long study aimed at testing the theory that constant connection to everything, all the time, has unintended consequences. At a time when more than 90% of Americans have a smartphone, we forget that having an internet-enabled supercomputer at our fingertips 24/7 is a new phenomenon.
The researchers measured three different outcomes of well-being, mood, and attention at the beginning, middle, and end of the four-week study. While 91% of participants improved their scores in at least one category, 71% reported better mental health after the break, compared to before, and 73% reported better subjective well-being.
A break from the internet on their phones also improved participants' attention spans, which was measured by a computer task. They tracked images that alternated between mountain scenes and cities. Prior research has shown that performance tends to drop off as people age, but to the researchers' surprise, after the internet break, there was a significant boost in scores. "The effects on attention were about as large as if participants had become 10 years younger," Castelo says.
It's not clear how long-lasting the effect of less time online would be, but this study validates what has been found in observational studies. "It's one of the first experiments that does provide causal evidence that reducing time spent on your phone has all these significant benefits," Castelo said.
Here is the link to the whole article: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/24/nx-s1-5304417/smartphone-break-digital-detox-screen-addiction
Now what was quite interesting is that it wasn’t as much what people “lost” or “gave up” when they put down their phones even for an hour. It was about what they GAINED! Instead of scrolling on the phone, people went outside. They talked to each other. They communicated. They read a book. Please understand, people still checked email, but did so later, not constantly. People still used social media, but social media was not buzzing in their pockets for even one simple hour a day. What a novel idea!
I was amazed the other day, during a funeral. The person who did this will never read this blog, and even if she did, oh well. I will never see her again, which is why I didn’t say anything. I was behind the altar, celebrating communion. I was saying the words of institution, lifting up the bread and the wine, and all the while she was texting on her phone. Her phone was literally lifted up as I lifted up the bread and wine. There’s an image for you that says it all.
Lent is almost upon us. What if we all just agreed to put our phones aside for small portions of our days? Ideally you have dinner with loved ones and the phones are not present. Maybe you go for a walk, with or without someone? Maybe you do like I do and go to a coffee shop and leave the phone in the car. What if someone dies, people have asked me? Well, they are dead, and I will find out about it within an hour or so. My father and his father before him were wonderful pastors, present in times of grief and difficulty, and they never had cell phones.
At the same time, I recall, my dad would pick up the phone during dinner. He would not let it ring. He just had to be always there. I resented that. He would talk for five or ten minutes, and we had to be quiet. My point is cell phones haven’t created this problem, but they have made it terrible.
We can do better.
And, during Lent, your church offers great opportunities to put aside your phones. What if everyone except maybe a first responder or the like, left their phones in their cars during church? At least, what if everyone turned them off during worship and did not look at them at all? What if you make a point of coming to Lenten evening suppers and worship and again, leave the phone behind? Parents, what if you stepped up and insisted that your child live without his or her phone for that time, and you did the same? It is possible. It really is. It is easy to get into habits.
Years ago, on Christmas Day, I lifted my arms to celebrate the eucharist. At that very moment my cell phone went off, in my pocket, under my robes. I had forgotten about it. Needless to say, I was embarrassed, and joked that the minister should definitely turn off his phone during worship!
Okay, so I have to get off my soap box. Just know, during worship, I will be looking. Besides, God commands it. Psalm 24: Lift up your heads!
-Pastor Trump
