This weekend, I had the privilege of being invited to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the USC campus to represent the book I wrote with my therapist twin sister, Tech-Pecked or Tuned In: Finding God in an Anxious World. For a book nerd like me, it was heaven- books everywhere. But it was even more rewarding to get my book about connecting with God into the hands of college students, and so many families who attended the event. I am delighted that more and more people are identifying with the idea that in-person relationships have to take priority over digital ones and that finding God brings life. Folks, including parents, in today’s world are resonating with this quote from Tech-Pecked:
“Has it become easier for us to invest in our digital avatars that are permanently pressed, wrinkle resistant, and cellulite free than it is to learn how to feel comfortable in our own skin? Have we grown used to feeling the pull of perceived popularity by the number of likes our posts receive rather than investing in the love we get from eye-to-eye, knee-to-knee conversations?”
“In her bookazine, Turn Off Your Phone Reconnect With Your Life, author Orianna Fielding writes, ‘We seemed to have reached a point where we willingly trade real communication and human contact for a piece of hardware. A smartphone does not breathe, or have a pulse or think, but we often give it more attention than we give our partners, children, and work colleagues. We give it power by allowing it to monopolize our time, our thoughts and our relationships...We have been carried along by a digital wave of change and as a consequence we seem to have lost our ability to experience life in real time. We have lost the ability to find the ‘spaces in between’, filling them instead with digital noise. Managing our digital lives seems itself to have almost become a full-time job. We wear ‘busyness’ as a trophy but in reality our busyness is not productive. None of us are really ‘too busy’. We just need to change the way we prioritize our time and choose living life over digitally editing it on a 2-inch screen.’”
“Our digital connections are generating anxiety in our already overly anxious lives. The alternative is to slow our roll long enough to connect with the Holy Spirit of the Living God within us. What a great trick of Satan to keep us so wrapped up with the urgent messages of the world that we don’t have time or space in our souls to hear the important messages from God.”
(from Tech Pecked on Tuned In: Finding God in an Anxious World https://www.editorialrenuevo.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=978-1-64142-239-0, Also available in Spanish.