“Honey, if you can hear us, your father and I are dying!”
June 2, 2019
We all know what it is like to have our phone or computer’s low battery notification pop up at the most inopportune times! We also know the accompanying panic which follows the thought that our phone is about to die! Google captures this anxiety well in a commercial promoting a Chromebook computer with an all-day battery life. The commercial depicts people, with dying batteries, at the gym, on a train, in an airport or video chatting with their children exclaiming, “I’m dying!” On first blush, this commercial is quite humorous and perhaps effective in promoting the Chromebook with 24 hours of battery life! However, once the implications of the panic are understood, the commercial becomes more of a tragic statement about our need to stay connected to our phones and the anxiety that being disconnected can produce.
Click here: I’m Dying
“Disconnection Anxiety”, so aptly named, is a very real experience of which most of us are familiar! Techopedia, an IT education website, defines this anxiety as a feeling of discomfort that occurs when a heavy Internet user is unable to access the online world. The level of a “pain” associated with this can range from mild discomfort to outright panic. It stands to reason that the more connected a person is, the more strongly he or she will feel disconnect anxiety. Our “life” is contained in our mobile-devices and computers—professional documents, schedules, banking information, so small wonder we feel “lost” when unexpectedly disconnected!
I know firsthand what disconnection anxiety feels like and how difficult it is to go without my mobile phone for even one day. Ashamedly, I often feel more panic at being disconnected from technology than I do from being disconnected from the testaments of Scripture. I do not always feel the same anxiety if I miss a day in God’s Word as I do if I miss a day texting and emailing my words in cyberspace.
The psalmist in Psalm 42 expresses how he thirsts after God, the object of his desire.
1As a deer pants for flowing streams,
so pants my soul for you, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
The degree of his desire is so strong and sincere that he compares it to the hot and thirsty deer panting after the water brooks. The psalmist cannot be satisfied with anything short of communion (connection) with God!
May I, may we purpose to stay connected to God, as the pen of Psalm 119: 97 declared:
“Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day.”