As I strenuously work out how I can stay in tension with the technology around me I have tried many different things.  As you have read below, I will never be connected via Facebook again.  I imagine (and hope) that some things I say here will generate questions.  So I am working to stay connected without obsession as follows:

In an effort to remain connected to the larger world without having to obssess over Facebook I have taken the liberty of keeping my Twitter (username: rdaythompson) and have started a Formspring account where you can ask any questions about this blog or what I write.  Feel free to ask whatever you want of course, but keep in mind that the tyranny of the glib will not shine through on my Formspring.  I will be as thorough as I can be in answering questions about my blog or theology to the best of my ability.

Keep in mind also that I will not answer hostile questions.  Frame questions you have carefully and irenically.  I have no interest in engaging in internet warfare.

Loving God!  Fearing God!

R. D. Thompson

I had some serious time to contemplate this week during a short vacation in Santa Cruz, CA and, after some prayerful contemplation, I have to admit that I am experiencing something of a crisis in the area of my relationship with technology and the current cultural trend of constant movement and busyness.  I wouldn't call this burnout but more of an existential frustration with being "plugged in."

Here's my beef: no matter where I am, what I am doing, or how I am doing it, there is a device demanding my attention.  As I sat on the beach with my good friend Michael Spotts and took some breaths without worrying about the internet, the telephone, the car or my next appointment I realized that I hadn't actually stopped to breathe and regain my composure without a device nearby or an imminent task in at least 8 months.

How can we live with this?  How can we even stay in a close relationship with Christ when we have nothing but incessant movement, a list of things to do, a linked up computer and a telephone in our pocket?  I have no doubt in my mind of the usefulness of these things in staying connected to the greater world but I have no clue how to keep a tension with them.  How ought we to relate to technology?  How ought we to relate to the brain-frying pace of life in civilized society?

Though I am not entirely certain that there is one overarching and universal answer, and remain mostly clueless and frustrated in my search for a proper tension, I think it wise to err on the side of the monks.

I don't suggest a lifestyle of slothful laziness (to which some monkery degraded), nor do I suggest a lifestyle of total asceticism and disconnection from society (though it sounds undeniably attractive in the current situation).  However, I do suggest a lifestyle devoid, or at least trimmed, of the incessant.  I think that we as Protestants (if you are Protestant and reading this) would be wise to healthfully consider the words and rule of St. Benedict, "Idleness is the enemy of the soul.  Therefore, the brothers should be occupied according to schedule in either manual labor or holy reading."1  Yes, they had a schedule.  Yes, they had things to do.  Yes, they even had some form of the technology of the day.  But their schedule, their list, and their technology had one main aim: God.  Nothing got in the way of the pursuit of God as misguided as it may or may not have been.  They had hours and hours to pray and read and worship and work.  Where are the hours in our schedule to pray and read and worship?  We have a whole lot of work and busyness in our schedules, we have a whole lot of idleness in our schedules, but for some reason we see prayer and worship and study as things which have to be spontaneous and cannot be scheduled.  How did the monks do it?  Benedict suggested that his monks should work for around six to eight hours (taking breaks to pray), read for two or three (taking breaks to pray), eat for one or two (while someone read a Christian book in the background), pray for one or two, engage in daily corporate worship for one or two, and then sleep for whatever was left over.  This was all to be conducted in virtual silence and was once considered the most godly form of living.  It was a legitimate and sane lifestyle that included a vow of poverty and the abandonment of ownership of property.  It was a highly balanced lifestyle that abhorred the incessant and valued that which mattters most: God, the Bible, and community.

While I don't think we need to return to the old Monasticism (God forbid!) or that we need to create a new monsaticism (a la some misguided Emergents), I do suggest that we stop wasting our time on mere trifles and order our existence with the understanding that everything we do here is temporary and that what we put into our souls and our minds is going to dictate how we live our daily lives.

If we go on living in the incessant we will continue to experience burnout and emptiness.  If we do not at least evaluate our relationship to technology and culture we will continue to experience incredible spiritual frustration.  If I personally don't make room in this non-stop manner of life for silence and solitude and if I don't work to eliminate both furious activity and shiftless idleness, will it be 8 more months until I find time to rest my mind and focus silently on the work of Christ in prayer and solitude?  For the love of God, I hope not.

Pray.  Read.  Contemplate.  Fear God.  We need to do it a lot more than we currently are.

Loving the Almighty YHWH with you friends,

R. D. Thompson

- - - - - - - - - - -

1 St. Benedict, The Rule of St. Benedict, trans. Anthony C. Meisel and M. L. del Mastro (New York: Doubleday, 1975), 86.

Facebook is an incredible tool.  Through Facebook I have kept contact with friends all over Europe and America.  I have been able to photograph my child and let everyone see the photos in 5 minutes.  Through setting my statuses with links to information on my various blogs I can direct traffic into my business or thinking.  I can share links, photos, videos and let all 1000 of my friends know where I am, what I am doing, and why I am doing it while doing it.  This is unprecedented and incredible.  It is also incredibly useful.  So why would I leave Facebook?

I have discovered, through the incessant use of Facebook for two years, that this medium is ultimately a failure despite these benefits.  I believe it is a failure because it promotes the current cultural shortcoming of being glib.  Anything you say, absolutely anything, must be kept short and stupid.  I have had myriads of “friends” tell me that I was failing to be simple enough in statuses and notes.  That I needed to keep it short and sweet.  This is not a good thing and will only continue to further a glib and careless society that has time only for sound bites and flashes of light.  A society that has the attention span of a hummingbird.  How can I, as a Christian, seek to speak comprehensively and relevantly to a society desperately in need of substantial intellectual food?  Facebook is, apparently, a completely failed medium in this respect.

Further, otherwise wonderful people who would never speak to my face with such rancor and abrasiveness find it necessary to critique everything I say and do not seek to further intelligent conversation.  In fact, it would appear that these people do not even believe that intelligent conversation belongs on Facebook.  My simple question is this: why would any honest Christian waste the precious and fleeting moments of this life on such banal nonsense as Facebook if intelligent conversation is not allowed on Facebook?  Facebook has failed in this respect in furthering people’s careless and privatized attitude about religion, politics and anything that matters in life.  If we as Christians continue to let the world know that we don’t care about truth by posting sound bites and flashes of light on Facebook we are being unfaithful.

Not to say that all Christians using Facebook are unfaithful.  Many Christians use this resource to post needed prayer requests.  To post updates on illness.  To post updates on family and they leave it there.  This is an upside to Facebook and these people do not necessarily need to stop using it.

However, what use is a tool that sucks up all of our precious moments in life when we could be reading?  When we could be talking?  When we could be studying?  Why are we spending even 30 minutes (and this is a generous number...for many the time is exponentially higher than this) perusing other people’s walls?  What is the point of this?  Facebook is not a relational tool in the long run unless we intend to form relationships that run about an inch deep.

I desire to see Christians, myself included, oppose the glib anti-intelligence of our culture and spend their lives learning about God and spending time in relationship and mission.

Hours of Facebook is not helping this cause.  When people would give up chocolate before they would give up Facebook, something is wrong.  I can no longer honestly give this medium my approval.  Even for business uses.  Goodbye forever, Facebook.

I have a new podcast coming up soon but it isn't quite ready yet.

So, in the meantime, enjoy one of my favorite tributes to Calvin and Hobbes via one of the best, and albeit a bit macbre, comics in Lio.

Amelia and Cedric, my firstborn son, are napping happily right now (Cedric PASSED out after his herbal bath and diaper change adventure...he wasn’t too thrilled and screamed murder which made him tired and sleepy!) so I thought this would be the appropriate time to summarize our really fantastic birth story.  Naturally, I didn’t push a baby out, so this will be somewhat one-sided.  However, I was there and caught my baby in my living room and heard everything Amelia said and did from beginning to end.  So it will be a fair account.

Disclaimer:  If you don’t want to read a fairly detailed account of labor, I advise stopping here.

On Friday the 21st at 4 AM in the morning I tied up a paper and went into the bedroom to fall asleep for a few hours before class.  Amelia woke up and promptly had a spate of fairly strong contractions that had no particular pattern or progression.  However, due to the strength of the contractions she called Sena (our midwife) and asked her to come over just to check.  Sena sent her assistant Arian because we didn’t think it was labor.  Arian came and affirmed that it probably wasn’t labor (softened cervix but no dilation) and told us to keep in touch if anything happened.  We had a pre-natal on Saturday morning and decided to keep it since the contractions tapered off by around 9:30 Friday morning.  I got my paper in (by some act of God), went to work, and came home.

On Saturday morning at around 9:30 fairly slight contractions started again.  They weren’t anything earth-shattering so we went to our pre-natal where Sena said stuff like this could on for quite a while, not to worry about it, and to call her if we needed her.  We decided to go walk around Colorado Mills Mall and proceeded to trek the entire thing all the way around.  We had lunch at Chipotle and went home.  My brother Dak was supposed to show up at 3:30 to bring a chicken and spend the night hanging out with me.  At this point we thought nothing of the minor contractions Amelia was experiencing so it didn’t seem like a big deal.  Sena said this could go on for a week right?  I figured since Dak was coming we should take a nap before we got there and this turned out to be a GREAT choice because it got Amelia well rested.  When Dak got to the house we hung out played some old school video games together and Amelia prepared the chicken and made some chili.  When the chicken was done Amelia went into the bathroom and grunted through some slightly stronger contractions.  This was about 5:30 PM and we still didn’t think much of it.  They were spaced at about 10-15 minutes apart lasting around 25 seconds.  Meh.  So Dak and I ate our chicken and realized it wasn’t enough for one person let alone three people.  This caused us to go get Kokoro (our favorite Japanese restaurant) so that we could be fully fed to play games the rest of the night.  When we got back Amelia was laid out on a chair in the living room having clearly stronger contractions.  This caused quote number one from Dak, “I’m going to stop drinking now.”  Why?  Because this looked a BIT stronger and looked like, perhaps, somewhere much further down the road, Amelia MIGHT have a baby and Dak MIGHT need to drive home.  Amelia went into the bathroom again and after 10 minutes called me in to tell me that her contractions were lasting a minute and were spaced at around 4-5 minutes apart...well...that WAS something but the exact same thing had happened on Friday morning so neither of us really believed it would come to anything.  It was 6:30 PM and since Amelia was expressing her discomfort I decided I would give Dak the choice to go home.  “Well...they’re fairly strong...you may not want to hang around.”  I have never seen my brother leave a place more quickly than he did then.  He ZOOMED out of the house, forgot to say goodbye, came back and said goodbye 3 seconds later, RAN to his car and sped back home.  I made sure to tell him NOT to tell Mum and Papa why he had to come home so that they wouldn’t get concerned and call us.  For about the last 6 weeks we had decided that when Amelia went into labor we were going to tell no one in order to avoid false hopes or annoying phone calls.  AND, we wanted this to be an extremely private and intimate experience that went on between just us, baby and midwife.

Dak left.  That was a really good thing because Amelia decided it was time to make some semi-uncomfortable noises (nothing loud, just some whining...Dak wouldn’t have been comfortable) and the contractions came on like gang-busters lasting a minute or more and spacing themselves every 3-4 minutes.  Welp, they really didn’t go anywhere and we really felt this couldn’t ACTUALLY be labor but called Sena just to make sure at around 7:30 PM.  She said if we didn’t feel like we needed her not to worry about it and call her when we felt like we needed her.  We didn’t really feel like we needed her so Amelia just worked out similar contractions for about an hour.  I decided to call Sena again to make sure about what we were doing at around 8:30 PM.  Amelia said she didn’t feel like she needed Sena still so I told Sena to take a nap and we would call her back.  At this point, Amelia hopped (lumbered really) into the tub and handled those contractions pretty well.  Birthing tubs ROCK.  Then, something really odd happened.  The contractions backed off and spaced themselves at about 7.5 minutes lasting a minute.  I figured that this little incident was over but the contractions DID get stronger...odd.  After a surprisingly strong contraction Amelia said she wanted Sena.  I figured this was going to last at least another 10 hours at this rate and based on stories we had heard this wasn’t a bad assumption.  But Amelia wanted Sena so I called her and told her to mosey on over.  No big deal, just some stronger contractions and Amelia felt like she would be more comfortable with her there.  I told her to take her time.  That was about 9:30 PM.  I walked back upstairs after calling Sena, grabbed some good reading material, and hunkered down in a chair next to the birthing tub.  Just like every other contraction Amelia told me when she started this next contraction and I held her hand, rubbed her back and muttered encouraging things to her.  The contraction began to ebb so I went and sat down and began focusing on my reading again.  Then, all hell broke loose.  Amelia start screaming and, I supposed, the contraction wasn’t exactly over (good call dummy) and then she said, “MY WATER BROKE!  AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” 

Weeeel, that means the baby could come anytime in, oh, the next 24 hours.  It was what she said next that almost knocked me over, “I need to push!”  Um...excuse me? 5 minutes ago your contractions were 7 MINUTES APART!  WHAT IN THE WORLD?  Of course, I said none of this but calmly went and changed into my swimming trunks and called Sena.  In my calmest nonchalant voice I said, “Oh hey Sena.  You may, um, want to not mosey so much anymore.  Her water just broke and, well, she SAYS she wants to push?”  Sena assured me she would hop in the car right then.  I hopped (literally) into the birthing tub and offered Amelia, who was on a hands and knees in the water, any support she asked for.  And then, wonder of wonder, she started pushing.  Oh boy, Sena probably wasn’t even off of Wadsworth yet and we live on Colorado and Hampden, 20 minutes from Sena.  This was around 9:50 PM.  I held my position and offered any support I could.  10 minutes later the baby was starting to crown.  I could feel head.  Sena wasn’t there yet.  I started going over all of the videos I have seen in my head of guys catching their babies completely alone so I would be mentally ready if Sena didn’t make it.  She got there 5 minutes later, probably having broken every speed limit on the way.  Baby was crowned pretty well at this point, 10:10 PM or so.  The pushing spaced out and progress was made more slowly.  After around 35 minutes of that Cedric’s head came out about halfway and stayed there.  I knew this was it.  Three minutes later Amelia pushed the head out.  He was anterior so I could see his eyes.  The shoulders turned, and, shazam, Cedric was out into my catching papa hands.  Sena basically just stood there and watched me catch Cedric and then helped me make sure the cord got unwrapped since the cord was around his neck (which isn’t really as bad as it is made out to be, I assure you).  It was 10:52 and we immediately handed the baby to Amelia.  He let out a couple squeaks and started checking things out.  Done deal.  Sena had been there less than 50 minutes. 

The rest, of course, is history (and boring and unprintable :-)).  The thing I said to Sena over and over was, “Seriously, Sena, it was nothing and then within 2 minutes it was the real thing.”  Amelia had gone from 7 minute spaced contractions to active labor in around 2 minutes.  When that water broke, it was ON.  Labor, active or no, lasted, we estimate, from 6:30 to 10:52.  4 hours and 22 minutes.  Sheesh lady.

The first thing I said was, “Dude, his shnorffles are HUGE!”  Thanks Mr. Lange.  A little later Amelia said, “That was FANTASTIC.  I am SO glad I did this at home.” 

This was an amazing experience.  Thanks for your prayers and your support!  No phone calls until at least this next Thursday please!  Facebooking is welcome!