Pray Chattanooga

“Those who pray well, work well.”? -David McIntyre in The Hidden Life of Prayer BTW, one of my "top 3" books on prayer I've ever read.

While I am suspicious that this is just a PR move, and that they are possibly doing this because they got exposed in The Anxious Generation for purposefully addicting teens to their products, I welcome the move and want more of it. We should all be sounding the alarm that many tech companies are functioning as the next "Big Tobacco" and we need a day of reckoning on some level.

This is yet another example of how our world ASSUMES we have to be plugged in all the time, with everything, everywhere. But I think we should start thinking of ways to push back against this mindset. Can we start to create a world where not everything has to be plugged in, where we make less use of tech because we chose the best option for ourselves and our businesses? YES, there are inconveniences to operating in such ways, BUT there are inconveniences to using digital technologies. Disney has a huge digital headache right now... is it worth it? Sometimes we are going to choose more tech, but we shouldn't keep a bias that more tech is always better. There are hidden costs few are talking about. Sure, less trees are killed when you use digital over paper, but all those servers and databases have an impact on the environment because they use a lot of electricity. Just a friendly reminder to think through your options.

Steady. Steady. Steady. SPIKE. The answer is obvious, but we’re all in denial that social media is ruining our kids lives. Excuses I hear from parents: 1- They’ll be socially ostracized if they don’t have social media. That’s it. I’ve never had a parent provide a primary reason outside of “social benefits” for allowing their kids on social media. Now pause. Really read those questions in the chart. Red: I can’t do anything right. Green: My life is not useful. Blue: I do not enjoy life. Those are super heavy questions. Imagine yourself being asked those questions right now. How would you have to be feeling in order to answer in the affirmative to any of them? Look closely at the blue line. It went from hovering around 23% to spiking to the top with the others at around 50%. All in less than a decade. 50% of kids say that they do not enjoy life. ????????FIFTY PERCENT???????? How long until we stop denying it? Say it for what it is. ? Social media is to us what smoking was to society in the 1950’s. End of story. ***If you haven’t yet, read “The Anxious Generation”. It may just be the factor that helps you turn the corner on this issue.

Been reading through this EXCELLENT book in preparation for our next Patristics and Prayer group. I've been underlining and writing notes on virtually every page! If you're in the Chattanooga metro area and you'd like to discuss this book and pray with a group of Protestants and Catholics, let me know! https://lnkd.in/eD6yFS2Z

I am constantly looking for ways to divest myself of too much tech, and I use a couple of apps to block web use entirely on evenings and weekends, and to limit what sites I can go to. Research is showing more and more that we get addicted to not only websites, but also access to information, being "needed" by others, and even the glow and pretty colors of our screens. It's not good for us, and this adds up in ways we don't even realize until we either run into a mental or physical health problem due to overloaded anxiety/stress, or we disconnect and see how much better we feel. I highly recommend working on this, and I am praying most days that our world becomes more sane and that more tech is developed to help customers choose how little or much tech they want on a phone or computer. I believe there is a market for this in the near future.