A Proper Beginning to Lent
While posting my most recent blog entry in anticipation of our Africa trip, I was stricken with the inadvertent Lenten discipline I'll be taking for the next two weeks. It has me justifiably nervous!
Being a proper child of the digital age, my daily routine is spent juggling my laptop, a cell phone, a PDA, an iPod and various and sundry electronic gadgets. I am connected to my peers and my friends and my family for 24 hours a day. Texting, video messaging, email, blogs, newsfeeds all combine to keep me informed and to make my own life available to those I love.
While in Africa, I will have none of these things. I will be utterly disconnected from my daily reality and the quick easy fix of calling on friends or family at any time the mood strikes. I will be absent the daily, hourly, almost down to the minute flow of information that I have become accustomed to.
No news; no gossip or scandal; no quick and easy way to look up a fact I do not know; or answer a question with the immediacy of the digital age. No way to write a quick article or reflection or hammer out a new poem on the keyboard. Heavens... I may have to actually use pen and paper!
This is a prospect that I find terrifying and exhilarating at once. And it will certainly require of me more patience and deliberation than I have had need of in a very long time.
I am an information junkie. And that quest for constant connection, the exploration of ideas and the constant question and answer dialectic informs so much of my life and even my search for an understanding of God and God's history with us, that to be without my digital fix for the next two weeks begs a very serious question:
Is this something God has placed in my path for Lent to make me find new ways to express my longing?
And secondly, have the use of these means of communication in my life usurped the role of waiting in my life as a reminder that I cannot always have what I want when I want it?
As I embark on the journey today, I will miss my family and friends and all of those with whom I have daily interaction through the wonders of electronic information sharing. I will be absent my digital community that gives me so much nourishment.
You will all be in my prayers and thoughts and I will try to record as much as I can using my good old fashioned memory cells... rusty as they are... so that I can share with you all when I return.
I ask for your prayers as we travel, so that we might not only find safety on our journey, but that I might also enter in to the Lenten journey so surprisingly sprung upon me. I trust that God will reveal something mighty and marvelous if I enter fully into the desert of "digital aloneness" that has been prepared for me.
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