It’s about three minutes into the video about the Light Phone that I decide it’s not for me and that the minimalist fantasy it’s selling is a luxury item, despite its “affordable” slogan. I’m as conscious as anyone about addictive use of a smartphone, and I have come close to springing for a flip phone or one of these novel “anti-smart” phones more than once. But I’ve thought it all the way through now, and it’s a bad deal, for two reasons.

First, the way I use my smart phone impacts other people, namely my family. Location sharing, messaging, ride-sharing: if one of us was suddenly without these tools it would affect the other two. Outside my family, I share music through the streaming music player with friends several times a week, and the inability to do that would diminish contact with those friends (I know, I could do that on a computer, but would I?).

The other main reason I’m done pining for a minimalist phone is that they seem to be marketed to social media-obsessed young adults. The video I’m referring to was by a 20-something tech reporter who was astounded to discover after a couple of days without her iPhone that she could live without Instagram and TikTok. I’m 45. I already know that. I only have one of those apps on my phone, and I use it maybe once a week; if Daughter didn’t have it, I wouldn’t either. Most of my peers have figured out how to live productive lives without constantly posting to and scrolling through social media feeds. I don’t need a different phone to prevent me from doing that.

You probably don’t need a Light Phone. If it appeals to you, I assure you there are different ways to use the smart phone you already have: turn off all the notifications, for starters. We can choose how to use these tools–we don’t need to buy new ones.

The choice between working for external goals and internal ones is false. The internal goals are met through the external ones. Again, Chesterton: “Vigorous organisms think not about their processes but about their aims.”

Focusing on the quality of our own life, for its own sake, is a pathway to misery. This is true for us as individuals, as churches, and even as countries. We find our life by giving it away to the grand purposes of compassion and service and to celestial visions of justice and equity. The healthiest thing we can do for ourselves is to strain after something that is bigger than us.

The world got worse this week, but my schedule and my to-do list look the same as they did on Monday. Yours probably do too. I’m going about my days as if the post-WWII global order is not in danger of dissolution. I’m checking the news more frequently is all.

This is our most recent reminder that order is not the default setting for humanity and the experience of most humans for most of history is as subjects to the warring territorial ambitions of the leaders with the weapons. Herein lies our greatest depravity, yet herein also lies our greatest capacity for beauty and empathy and endurance. This is a hard reality to stare down on a Thursday, so instead I make lists and cook dinner.

There will be more to do later.

Walk: propose a way forward.

Chew gum: make space for peoples’ voices to be heard about the way forward, especially people whose voices have not been heard, historically, systemically.

We can do both.

We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

What other choice do we have?

“The whole conversation” is an abstraction that isn’t going to help anyone in any concrete way. We need a series of conversations, each one stemming from its predecessor, and each one asking what we need to do differently and which conversation needs to come next.

The whole conversation about racial equity is a verbal exercise. But the conversation about interviewing practices is an effort to create change.

The whole conversation about church decline is a shoulder shrug until it decides to talk about this Sunday’s order of worship.

The whole conversation about your health is marketing. The conversation about the Twix bars you keep buying in the checkout aisle is fuel for growth.

The whole conversation is a deception. This conversation is really where it’s at.

“If you want” feels like a slight, like the person saying it doesn’t think what you want matters, but they’re willing to relent if you really care about it. It’s a way of saying “I don’t want,” but I won’t resist if you do.

If it’s the best we can get we should probably take it. We can’t change what others want, but we can get clear about what we want, why we want it, and what we’re willing to risk for it.

The bang and blackout happen simultaneously, a fact I discerned the first time it happened and have rediscovered twice more since, including last night. It’s the transformer in the alley across the street. All the buildings on the block go dark, but the streetlights stay lit.

It’s never more than an hour or so, which is almost perfect. It’s long enough to have that conversation with yourself about how soft electrical heating and wifi have made you, how inattentive, and to resolve to make changes, but not long enough to endure the serious disruption of a prolonged power outage. When everything turns back on your first feeling is sadness; the benefits of life in the grid accompany constant demands.

You turn everything off manually and head for bed, clicking your analog alarm clock switch to “on,” happy that you bought it so that you can sleep with your phone in the kitchen and not by your bedside. The drawback of the clock will be lost on you until the morning: though analog, it too is electric, and it is now an hour behind.

The strongest relationships are the ones that share a common object that is bigger and more significant than the individuals in the relationship, even bigger than the relationship itself. Relationships that fixate on the process and experience of being in relationship for the sake of the relationship are doomed. Relationships that are their own ends, instead of means to greater ends, get trapped inside themselves.

G.K. Chesterton said that “Vigorous organisms think not about their processes but their aims.”

Relationships need aims.

I’m meeting this week with a colleague about an idea he has. We’re going to flesh out some of the details before he shares the idea with the whole staff team.

One-on-one idea exploration is starting to feel critically important. I’ve wasted a lot of peoples’ time asking them to do something with an idea that I’ve not thought carefully about (but feel inspired to share). In all those cases, everyone would have been well-served by my seeking out an individual first, someone who might have asked critical questions about cost or scheduling or conflicts of interest, someone who might have seen possibilities I couldn’t. They could have refined the idea, making it easier for others to understand it and act on it.

If you can be that person to someone else’s idea, you will make a valuable contribution.

“I still think I don’t want to go to practice tonight,” she said. It was the only thing she said, and it was notable as much for the fact of its utterance as much as what it uttered; she doesn’t speak to us in the morning. We’d hardly spoken of this since Tuesday night, when she cried all the way home and bellowed that she was never going back. She’d been wrestling the matter to the ground silently while we watched.

“That’s it then,” her mother cautiously interpreted. “If you don’t practice tonight you don’t compete on Saturday. You’re quitting.”

She looked down at the countertop where she sat for one, two, three beats. “Yeah, it just takes up all my free time and I don’t need to be talked to like that anymore, like I’m lazy and nothing I do is good enough.”

I stood still and tried not to intrude on the announcement or the hard labor that it took to give it. But we were late for school, so I ventured “Okay . . . you can give it the day to be sure and we’ll talk about it again after school.” She didn’t answer, but grabbed her coat and backpack and made for the door.

We were in the car home from school barely a minute when she came back to the subject. “I still don’t want to go tonight.”

As flatly as I could, I probed, “You want to be done with cheer?”

“I thought about it all day,” she explained. I didn’t doubt her. She’s thought of hardly anything else these past several days, weeks in fact. She did “research” on it today, though, spelunking the depths of TikTok and YouTube for videos with the #cheer hashtag, no doubt looking for testimonies to support her conviction. She found it a’plenty, to hear her tell it: accounts of former cheerleaders with eating disorders and anxiety and depression. I didn’t begrudge the search for support, but something about relying on TikTok to make a major decision made me wobbly.

“More than anything you see on social media, how you feel about the activity and what you want is what really ma–“

“Yeah, I know.”

We drove a few more blocks before I moved to matter to its inevitable terminus. “So when we get home I’ll call your coach and tell him you’re not coming tonight and that you’re finished with the gym.”

She hesitated but a moment before she answered. “Yeah.”

And that’s how it happens that hours in your week suddenly become available and that entire weekends open up, hotel reservations, car rentals, and flights are cancelled, and you text the only other parent from the team you know, the one who has given Daughter rides to practice in a pinch, to wish his kid the best. That’s how you find yourself controlling your volume and tone on the phone with the coach who tells you he’s been coaching for 35 years and has never had any problems, an assertion that conveys all the problems you didn’t know you already knew. You tell him that a serious concern for the kid is the way athletes who leave get talked about by the coaches, and he protests, “Oh no, I’m an adult. I don’t talk about people when they’re not there.” You know from your own observation that is false. And so you wish him well and hang up, and when the gym manager calls later to inform you that they are processing the early cancellation fee you agreed to, you consider it a worthwhile investment.