Blogging on the Sabbath – a call to digital rest.

“If you can’t take a nap, if you can’t take a day off, heaven’s going to drive you nuts.” [Mark Driscoll]

I first heard the concept of an ‘electric sabbath’ from Rob Bell during his drops like stars tour. The idea was to have an entire digital shutdown one day a week: No phone, no internet, no email, no streaming.

For some of us, myself included, this feels like shutting down a significant portion of our lives. We are left weightless and wallowing, bumping into walls while we try to remember the basic human mechanics of being AFK (let the nerd understand).

Our digital worlds have become a significant space for intellectual, emotional and social stimuli, and as such we move around them with both personality and identity. We leave digital fingerprints.

These digital fingerprints are unique, because they have been cultivated daily – perhaps even hourly – as some form of organic representation of who we are in this parallel online word. However accurate that representation is, and however tangible we believe that world to be are disputable, but no less a reality. We have basically created an extra limb – one that pulls to us when we don’t use it.

As a blogger with a reasonable online presence, this pulls at me in the ‘waking world’ with quite some insistence.

The refresh button and revisiting the same social media walls becomes an almost unconscious activity. I’ve had whole days when I have neglected the needs of my spirit, family, and work, because my head had been firmly wired into an unguarded twitter comment.

So, I suggest a pact. Let’s give ourselves a digital sabbath. A day away from the crawling needs and desires of our digital realm. I suggest a fast, a time when we climb down from our fickle electric thrones and embrace the wholeness of the world without it.

The irony of this post is that I’m writing it on a Sunday morning. In 45 minutes, I’ll be preaching. Wouldn’t this time have been better spent by… praying, meditating, preparing, talking to my wife, eating breakfast (you fill in the gap).

Growing in closeness to God requires some care taken over spiritual disciplines like praying and Bible reading. For spiritual disciplines to work, however, they require both spirit and discipline. Neither of these can be nurtured entirely without any level of sacrifice or – put another way – fasting.

A fast is saying no to something that our body or our ego needs, in order to recognise the level of dependency that we have in God.

When you’re sat in the office and it’s nearing lunchtime and your stomach is rumbling with anticipation, but then you suddenly remember that you’re fasting, a lead weight drops. You feel a sense of loss and almost desperation. This empty longing is a growth metaphor for how we need to long for God. That’s why fasting exists. We use that feeling and turn it into prayers of dependence on and recognition of who God is – and who we would be without Him.

I have a small, A5 presentation folder that I use for preaching. I’ve had it since I was first at Bible College and saw everyone else using them. I stopped using it almost ten years ago in favour of iPads and my MacBook (the Holy Spirit comes when there’s Apple products on stage right?) Recently, however, I rediscovered my little preaching folder and started using it again.

One of the reasons I use it now is the little inscription on the front page that I put there while in College. It says:

“You have offended God infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince – and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment.” [Jonathan Edwards, 1703 – 1757]

This is a heavy and somewhat brutal quote that says there is nothing apart from but God and His grace to uphold me  minute by minute. I am not my own, I was bought at a price, and it so important to me to reconnect with Him each day afresh. It’s important for me to recognise the depths from which He has saved me, and more the depths of need I have for Him each day.

That’s why we fast. That’s why we occasional withdraw.

The internet is noisy, and our digital fingerprints pull at us constantly. Perhaps a day off a week is not too much to ask to keep these things in check.

A digital sabbath. I think I might have a go!