Tolani lost her phone to the rain on a Monday evening in June. She was a pharmacist at a hospital in Ikeja, and she was standing at the bus stop at Ojota trying to wave down a keke while holding an umbrella, a bag of groceries and the phone, on which she was replying to a message from the family group. A danfo swung in too close, she stepped back, and the phone slid out of her hand into the brown water rushing along the gutter. By the time she had fished it out with the end of her umbrella, the screen was black.
At Computer Village the next day, the repairer opened it, shook his head and said he would need to order a part. “Six days, madam. Maybe five.” She had an old phone at home that could make calls, but it could do almost nothing else. For the first time in perhaps ten years, she was going to live a week without a smartphone.
What surprised her was not how much she missed it. It was how often her body reached for it. On the first day she counted, half as a joke. Standing in the hospital lift, she reached for her pocket. Waiting for a prescription to print, she reached for her pocket. At a red light in traffic, at the dinner table, in the bathroom, in the five minutes before the staff meeting started, her hand moved before her mind did. By evening she had stopped counting at forty-three. Twice she felt it vibrate against her leg. It was not there.
By the third day, other things began to happen. Her younger son, who was six, told her a long and complicated story about a lizard that had got into his classroom, and she heard all of it, from the beginning to the part where the teacher climbed on a chair. She noticed that the woman who sold fruit outside the hospital had a bandage on her wrist, and she asked about it. On Wednesday morning, sitting on the edge of the bed with nothing in her hands, she realised that she could not remember the last time she had prayed for ten minutes without reading notifications in between.
On Saturday her husband said something that she thought about for a long time afterwards. “You have laughed more this week,” he said. “And you have finished your sentences.”
Attention is spent in small coins
Very few people decide to give their lives away to a screen. Nobody wakes up and says, “Today I will spend four hours scrolling through things I will not remember tomorrow.” Attention is spent in small coins. A quick look at a message. A glance at the news. One more video while the rice is cooking. Each decision is tiny and almost unconscious. But small decisions repeated become habits, and habits become a way of life.
Tolani’s week showed her something that many of us have never seen clearly, because we have never stopped long enough to see it. Her hand reached for the phone more than forty times in a day. Most of those reaches were not decisions at all. They were reflexes.
It helps to be fair to technology. The same phone that distracted Tolani also let her video-call her sister in Manchester, pay her children’s school fees without queuing at the bank, check a drug interaction at work in seconds and read the Bible in three translations. These things are real goods. Many people’s livelihoods depend on a phone. Many families stay connected across oceans through one. To call the device evil would be both unfair and unhelpful.
The question is not whether we should use technology. It is whether we still choose how we use it, or whether it has begun to choose for us. Useful access becomes continual interruption at a point that is easy to miss. The tool that serves you when you pick it up starts to summon you when you put it down. Many apps are designed precisely to keep you returning, with endless feeds, notifications and small rewards. That does not remove your responsibility. It simply means that thoughtfulness about your attention is not optional. If you do not decide where your attention goes, something else will be glad to decide for you.
Something else is lost when every spare minute is filled. We lose the capacity to wait, to be bored, to sit with our own thoughts. That may sound like a small loss, but it is not. Many of the great moments of prayer in Scripture happened in unfilled places: in the wilderness, on a hillside, on a rooftop at noon. When Elijah fled to Horeb, God was not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but “after the fire a still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12). A still small voice is easily missed by someone who never allows a moment of stillness. The minutes we hand to the screen at the bus stop or in the queue were once minutes in which a believer might whisper a prayer, notice a neighbour or simply rest.
Attention is more precious than we usually think. What you attend to shapes what you love. The people, words and images that receive your attention will, over time, shape your heart. That is why Scripture has so much to say about where we fix our eyes.
Redeeming the time
Paul wrote to the Ephesians about how the children of light should live in a dark world. In the middle of that teaching he gave this instruction:
See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, Redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is .
“See then that ye walk circumspectly.” The Greek word behind circumspectly means accurately, carefully, with precision. It describes someone who looks around and pays attention to where he is going. The opposite is the person who drifts, who walks through life without noticing. “Not as fools, but as wise.” In Scripture, a fool is not necessarily unintelligent. He is someone who lives without reference to God and without considering the end of things.
“Redeeming the time.” The verb Paul uses means to buy up, to purchase out of the marketplace. Picture a woman at Mile 12 market as evening falls, when traders are packing up and prices are falling. She knows what she came for. She is not wandering from stall to stall. She buys what she needs while it is available. Paul says time should be handled like that. It is valuable. It is limited. It can be lost.
“Because the days are evil.” The world around us is not neutral. There are forces pulling at our time and attention that do not have our good at heart. That was true in first-century Ephesus. It is no less true when there is an endless stream of content competing for every spare minute of your day.
And then verse 17: “Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.” The point of redeeming time is not simply efficiency. It is to give our days to what God wants. A person can be highly productive and still waste his life. The wise believer asks more than “How can I get more done?” He asks, “What is the will of the Lord for this hour, this evening, this conversation?”
That question may lead you to put the phone down and listen to your son’s story about the lizard. It may lead you to pick it up and call a lonely friend. Either way, it is your decision, made before God, and not a reflex.
Martha, Martha
One of the most familiar scenes in the Gospels takes place in a home in Bethany:
Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word. But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me. And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.
We should be careful not to make Martha the villain. She was doing something good. She had welcomed Jesus into her house, and in that culture hospitality to a respected teacher and His disciples would have been a large and important task. There were people to feed. Someone had to do it.
But look at the word Luke uses: “Martha was cumbered about much serving.” The Greek word translated cumbered means to be pulled or dragged around, drawn away in different directions. Martha was not simply busy. Her attention was being pulled away from the Lord who was sitting in her own home. The service had become a distraction from the very Person she was serving.
Jesus’ answer is gentle. He says her name twice, “Martha, Martha,” the way you speak to someone you love who has become overwhelmed. “Thou art careful and troubled about many things.” Careful here means anxious, full of care. Troubled suggests being stirred up, agitated. “But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”
Notice the word chosen. Mary made a choice. She was not simply more spiritual by temperament. She decided that sitting at the feet of Jesus was more important, at that moment, than everything else that clamoured for her attention.
Most of what distracts us is not sinful. Messages from colleagues. News that matters. Work that has to be done. Family groups that genuinely help families. Like Martha’s serving, many of these things are good. The danger is that “many things” can crowd out the “one thing,” and that we can live for years pulled in every direction while the Lord sits in the room waiting.
Martha’s distraction also cost her something with the people around her. She resented her sister. She even spoke sharply to Jesus: “Lord, dost thou not care?” Distraction rarely stays private. When our attention is scattered, the people physically present feel it.
Not brought under the power of any
Paul wrote to the Corinthians, who were fond of quoting a slogan: “All things are lawful.” Paul answers with a sentence that has become one of the most useful tests for any habit:
All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.
There is a play on words in Paul’s Greek that English cannot fully capture. Lawful translates a word related to having the right or freedom to do something. Brought under the power translates a related word meaning to have authority over someone. Paul is saying, in effect: “I have the right to many things, but I will not let any of them have rights over me.”
That is precisely the issue with digital distraction. Using a phone is lawful. Watching a video is lawful. Checking social media is lawful. But the question Paul asks is whether these things have begun to exercise authority over you.
How can you tell? Here are some honest signs. You reach for your phone before you have consciously decided to. You feel anxious or irritable when you cannot check it. You lose track of time while scrolling and feel worse afterwards. Your phone is the first thing you touch in the morning and the last thing you see at night. You find it difficult to read a page of Scripture or pray for a few minutes without checking it. The people you live with have asked you to put it down, more than once.
There is a further reason Paul gives in the same passage. A few verses later he writes, “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Paul is speaking there about sexual purity, but the principle reaches wider. Your body and your mind belong to the Lord who bought them. That includes your sleep, which many of us now trade for one more video at one o’clock in the morning. The psalmist says that God “giveth his beloved sleep” (Psalm 127:2). A believer who keeps scrolling until his eyes close is refusing a gift, and he usually pays for it the next day in irritability, poor concentration and prayerlessness.
If several of these signs describe you, do not respond with shame. Respond with honesty. Paul does not say technology is wicked. He says the believer should not be mastered by anything except Christ. The freedom we have in Christ is freedom from every other master, and that includes the small ones that ring in our pockets.
PunchlineThe question is not whether your phone is lawful. It is whether it has begun to have authority over you. In Christ you are free, and that freedom includes being free from the summons of every notification.
The eye and the whole body
Jesus said something in the Sermon on the Mount that applies remarkably to the screens we look at all day:
The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
“If therefore thine eye be single.” The word single means simple, undivided, focused on one thing. Some have suggested it also carries the idea of generosity, as opposed to the “evil eye” of envy and greed, which fits the verses about treasure around it. Either way, Jesus is saying that what you look at, and how you look at it, affects your whole person. The eye is like a window. What comes through it fills the house.
That does not mean everything on a screen is darkness. But it does mean that the sheer amount of what we take in deserves our attention. A divided eye, darting from one thing to the next all day, makes for a divided heart. Many people find that hours of scrolling leave them restless, anxious, envious or simply empty. They have taken in a great deal and been fed very little.
The psalmist prayed:
Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity; and quicken thou me in thy way.
“Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity.” Vanity means emptiness, things without lasting substance. The psalmist knew that his eyes needed help. He could not simply rely on willpower. So he asked God to turn them, and then he asked for something positive: “quicken thou me in thy way.” Give me life. Turning away from emptiness is only half the prayer. The other half is turning toward what gives life.
NuggetThat may be a good prayer to pray each time you pick up your phone.
Jesus withdrew, and Jesus noticed
It is striking how often the Gospels show Jesus withdrawing from crowds and demands in order to pray. “And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed” (Mark 1:35). Luke records that when great multitudes came to hear Him and be healed, “he withdrew himself into the wilderness, and prayed” (Luke 5:16). The demands on Jesus were greater than any of us will face. The need around Him was real and urgent. And yet He protected time alone with His Father.
He also taught His disciples to do the same. When they came back from a busy season of ministry, He said, “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat” (Mark 6:31). Many of us know that kind of life, with so much coming and going that there is no space even to eat in peace.
But there is another side to the attention of Jesus. When He was with people, He was fully with them. In a pressing crowd, a sick woman touched His garment, and He stopped and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” (Mark 5:30). His disciples thought the question absurd, with so many people pushing around Him. But Mark says that “he looked round about to see her that had done this thing.” He noticed one person in a crowd. When blind Bartimaeus cried out on the road out of Jericho, “Jesus stood still, and commanded him to be called” (Mark 10:49). He stood still. At Jericho, again, He stopped under a sycamore tree and looked up at a small man who had climbed it to see Him (Luke 19:5).
Jesus’ attention had two directions. Upward to the Father, in protected times of prayer. Outward to the person in front of Him, especially the one others overlooked. Our devices threaten both. They fill the quiet places where prayer used to happen, and they divide our attention when we are with the people God has placed beside us.
Number our days
Moses wrote Psalm 90, the oldest of the psalms according to its title. It is a sober reflection on the shortness of human life. “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years” (Psalm 90:10). Then it turns to prayer:
So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
To number our days is to count them, to recognise that they are limited. A heart of wisdom grows out of that recognition. When you know your days are finite, you begin to ask what they are for.
Our children’s childhood is a limited number of days. Our parents’ remaining years are a limited number of days. The opportunities to sit with a friend, to be present at a meal, to listen to a story about a lizard, will not last forever. Some of us will one day realise that we spent thousands of those days only half there, with a screen in our hands. That realisation does not have to come at the end. It can come now, as a gift.
This is not a call to guilt. It is a call to wisdom. God gives us our days as a gift, and grace teaches us to receive them thoughtfully.
Thoughtful limits
It may help to think about practical limits. These are not laws, and they will look different for different people. Their purpose is to protect two things: your time with God, and your presence with the people physically around you.
Consider giving your first moments of the day to God before you give them to your phone. Many believers find it helpful to keep the phone out of the bedroom at night and to buy a simple alarm clock. If you read the Bible on your phone, consider turning on a setting that silences notifications while you read, or use a printed Bible for your morning devotions.
Consider your meals. A table where phones are put away is a gift to everyone sitting at it. The same is true of the car on the way to school, the hour after work when children want to tell you about their day, and the time you spend with an elderly parent.
PunchlineConsider your notifications. Most of them are not urgent. Turning off all but the essential ones can return a great deal of your attention to you.
Consider a regular rest. Some families choose one evening a week, or part of Sunday, when they set their devices aside together.
Consider worship and prayer meetings. Many of us now sit in church with a phone face up on our lap, glancing at it during the sermon and the prayers. Even if you use it for your Bible, a notification can pull your attention away in a moment. Put it on silent, or in your bag, and give the Lord and His people your undivided attention for those hours.
Consider what you will put in the space you have cleared. When a habit is removed and nothing replaces it, the old habit tends to return. Fill the freed minutes deliberately: a page of Scripture, a phone call to someone you have neglected, a walk, a conversation with your spouse, a book, an early night. Freedom from distraction is meant to make room for life.
And when you fail, as you will, come back without condemnation. You are not earning God’s favour by your screen-time figures. You already have it in Christ. Grace is the reason you want to give Him your attention, and grace is the help you receive when you find you have drifted again.
Some people cannot simply switch off. A doctor on call, a parent of a child in hospital and a trader whose customers order by message all need to remain reachable. Limits should be wise, not legalistic. And we must not judge others whose circumstances differ from ours. The goal is not a rule for its own sake. It is a heart that has chosen the good part.
Tolani collected her phone on Saturday afternoon. The repairer had replaced the part, and it came back to life in her hand. There were two hundred and fourteen notifications waiting. She scrolled through them slowly in the shop. Almost none of them had needed her. The one urgent message, from her sister about their mother’s hospital appointment, had already reached her through her husband’s phone.
She sat in the car outside Computer Village for a few minutes before she drove home. She thought about forty-three reaches in a day. She thought about the lizard and the fruit seller’s wrist and her husband saying, “You have finished your sentences.”
That evening she made a few decisions and wrote them on a card. The phone would sleep in the kitchen. The first half hour of the morning would belong to God, with a printed Bible. Notifications would be off except for calls and messages from her family and the hospital. The phone would stay in her bag at dinner and during the boys’ bedtime.
She has not kept every rule perfectly. Some weeks are better than others. But when I asked her a few months later what had changed, she said, “I learned what my hand was doing without me. Now, most of the time, I decide.”
Martha was troubled about many things. Mary chose the good part. Your phone will keep calling you, and much of what it offers is useful. But you are not under its power. Choose where your attention goes, and let the Lord and the people He has put beside you have the best of it.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- How many times a day do you think you reach for your phone without consciously deciding to?
- Which of the signs of being “brought under the power” of a device do you recognise in yourself?
- When did you last pray for ten minutes without interruption?
- Who among the people physically present with you most needs more of your attention?
- What is one “many thing” that is crowding out the “one thing needful” in your life?
This Week
This week, choose two thoughtful limits and keep them for seven days: for example, no phone for the first thirty minutes of the day, and no phone at meals. If you can, check your phone’s screen-time report at the start and end of the week. Each time you pick up your phone, pray silently the prayer of Psalm 119:37: “Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity; and quicken thou me in thy way.”
A Prayer
Lord Jesus, You withdrew to pray and You stood still for the one in the crowd. Teach me to give my attention as You did. Forgive me for the hours I have given away without thought, and for the times I have been only half present with the people You placed beside me. Like Mary, I choose the good part. Turn away my eyes from what is empty, and give me life in Your way. Help me to redeem the time, to number my days and to apply my heart to wisdom. I will not be brought under the power of any thing, for I belong to You. In Your name I pray, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.