Your disaffection serves somebody. It feels like opting out, but without a doubt, your lack of participation is a clear opting in to someone’s agenda.

Distrust and disaffection are not inevitable outcomes. They’re choices. It’s worth asking who’s pushing you in that direction.

Read this essay by Craig Mod in Wired about his long, mostly tech-free, walk across Japan. Reading it inspired me to take a long walk on the nearby riverfront trail last night and to leave my phone pocketed the whole time. Like Mod did, kind of:

I set very strict rules for this walk. The first set of rules limited my inputs. I would use only a tiny sliver of the internet. In practice this meant going cold turkey on all social networks and most news and media sites. I used a piece of blocking software on my phone and laptop called Freedom. I created a blocklist in Freedom and named it “THE PHONE IS A TOOL YOU DUMMY.” It prevented me from opening The New York Times app or Twitter or Facebook, virtual spaces all too easy to fall back into when approximately three seconds of boredom enter your frame.

Craig Mod, “The Glorious, Almost-Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan”

But here’s what occurred to me during my own walk: I hadn’t read the essay. I’d listened to it on Audm, an app that plays long form magazine articles, audiobook style. Audiobooks were a no-no on Mod’s walk.

What’s more, I learned about Audm from John Dickerson, one of the hosts of Slate’s “Political Gabfest” podcast. The app was his “cocktail chatter” at the end of the episode two weeks ago. That’s another thing Mod banned from his ambulation: podcasts.

This is the realization that came over me leaning on the rails of the Foster Avenue bridge over the North Branch of the Chicago River, that the inspiration for this moment of tech-free leisure owed its existence to the interaction of at least two artifacts of internet tech.

Maybe one of the things technology can be good at is getting us away from technology?

One compelling reason for spending time abroad is the deepening of one’s understanding of their native country. Case in point: during the nine months I lived in Northern Ireland, I read Beloved by Toni Morrison and understood things about America that my upbringing in a western American suburb (of Denver, no less–“Denver” is the name of Beloved’s protagonist) had been unable to teach me; I needed to be somewhere else to see it clearly.

Thus a lasting impact of my time in Ireland is the writing of American Toni Morrison.

Rest in peace.

If historical amnesia is a serious threat, then so is its opposite. I don’t know the technical term for it, but surely the condition of interpreting too much of the present through a filter of past memory has a catchy scientific label. Maybe “overmnensia?”

Those who are ignorant of the past may be doomed to repeat it, but those who are only able to experience the present as a reanimation of the past are doomed in a different way. They can’t account for the uniqueness of this moment. They are forced to exaggerate some threats, but also to underestimate others.

The present is not the past. It’s much better. It is also, in it’s own way, worse.

Yesterday we did what we know too well how to do now, insert silence and prayers for victims of gun tragedies into the Sunday service. My colleague did it with sensitivity and care.

I expect that when we do that it’s to speak to the shock and anger we’re all feeling after reading about it and watching nonstop news coverage. But some people in worship may be experiencing the tragedy directly. Yesterday a worshiper approached me after the service to thank us because she’s from Dayton, and, had she been home this weekend, she and her friends would have been right where the shooting took place. Her friends were there the previous evening. She was shaken, and I told her I was glad she was among us for worship, especially on this day.

It’s just a reminder the my assumptions about how people are affected by these events are often flawed. Mass shootings are multiplying in such a way that every new one not only traumatizes new victims in different communities but also reanimates trauma in all the other places that have been victimized. There is no immunity anymore.

It seems we need to lead worship now with that assumption.

The difficulty you don’t account for in working at a frenetic pace and taking on task upon project upon task is stopping. Because of course you can stop; you can make strategic changes to the organization or to your personal life to free up time and energy from the commitments cramming your calendar at present. But your brain and your body–even your spirit–are keyed to all those commitments, and you will not easily adjust to their absence.

An hour freed up from some prior obligation will easily be filled with another one. Otherwise, a voice in your head will whisper an accusatory question: “Why aren’t you doing more?” It will suggest you’ve become lazy and direct your attention to all the activity happening around you and on Pinterest and Instagram.

I think the feeling of effectiveness we’re chasing in our work (including our work running our households) is 1) a mirage–we will never feel effective enough–and 2) insidious to our spiritual health, which of course means our mental and physical health.

Busy is a choice. But busy for what?

People are always quoting Ronald Heifetz’s maxim about “the balcony,” how leaders need to devote time regularly to take a comprehensive view of their work and the relation of all its component parts. This is in contrast to the day-to-day demands of being down on “the dance floor.”

Here’s a good way to do that. Ask someone who knows nothing about your work to allow you to explain it to them in 30 minutes. Buy them a coffee. If this feels weird, consider the opportunities you may already have to do this, like when a new person joins the staff or a new colleague moves to town.

How you present everything in that time will be revealing: what do you explain first? What do you spend the most time on? What do you forget to mention at all?

I’ve always understood this “balcony” metaphor in solitary terms. It doesn’t need to be.

This article by Graeme Wood about the resurgent relevance of Sam Shepard’s plays brings back a few memories. The first is of reading “Fool for Love” in my college dorm the day before classes began my freshman year. It was the last play in an anthology required for a Theater 101 course, and for some unknown reason I started reading it in the middle of the afternoon. I was so gripped by it that I didn’t stop until I’d finished. My college education began in earnest before the classes did.

Two years later I was in Manhattan with a traveling drama ministry and went to see “Buried Child” at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. By that time I had read several Shepard plays but never seen one staged. I had not read “Buried Child.” It starred James Gammon of “Major League” and was directed by Gary Sinise. One of the actors hurled a coffee mug across the set, and it shattered against a wall.

The following fall I took an acting course and chose a scene from “True West” to perform with a classmate. It was really hard. I came away from it with a strong preference for reading Shepard over performing him, or, for that matter, performing at all.

Wood’s essay is worth the read. It prompted me to get tickets to “True West” playing at the Steppenwolf Theater this Saturday.

It’s gratifying to the preacher when a congregant shares how they used a sermon, how it spoke to them and guided a decision they made or an encounter they had with a stranger.

It also raises a question for the preacher: how am I using the sermons I preach?

Three mornings in the past week I have woken up and ambled into the kitchen to find it other than how I left it the night before. The pantry light it on. There is a torn-open tea bag and some cracked cardamom pods on the counter. The kettle is off its dock. I leave the kitchen clean and orderly when I go to bed at night, so these messes stand out.

She is 11, and she can now easily outlast us. We collapse into bed at night while she still has plans and the energy to carry them out. Thankfully those plans are only for making tea. For now.