Enslaved to the Phone

A friend once showed me his young daughter's crayon drawing of their family.

In the drawing, the daughter stands in the middle, holding hands with both parents. She and her mother are looking into each other’s eyes. But the father (my friend) is turned away from his family, his opposite hand holding his phone, staring at its screen.

Sometimes our children see us more clearly than we see ourselves.

The daughter’s drawing captures something we’d rather not admit about ourselves. We Americans spend an average of 5 hours and 16 minutes per day on our phones, a 14% increase from just one year earlier. But the real crisis isn’t measured in hours. It’s measured in what we’re losing while we scroll. 56% say friends and family are less present in social settings due to their phones. Additionally, 55% of people in a relationship wish their partner spent less time on their phones, and 54% wish their immediate family did the same. Recent research reveals something even more sobering: participants used their smartphone during 27% of their time around their partner; 86% used their phone every day at least some around their partner.

Here’s what should alarm us: frequent phone use around a partner, not just daily screen time, predicted lower relationship satisfaction and weaker coparenting.

We’re physically present but mentally absent. The people we love most sit right beside us while our minds are somewhere else.

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The Erosion of Presence

Jesus gave us two commands that contain all of the law and the prophets: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39). Everything else flows from these. Our entire purpose, our path to flourishing, our reason for being: it all comes down to loving God completely and loving others truly.

But here’s what our devices are doing to us. They’re severing us from the very thing we were made for. You cannot love God with all your heart when your heart is divided between the eternal and an endless, ubiquitous scroll. You cannot love your neighbor as yourself when you’re not actually present with your neighbor.

Love requires presence. Not just physical proximity, but the kind of attentive, undistracted, wholehearted presence that says, “You matter. This moment matters. I am here with you.” Captivity to our phones makes this nearly impossible.

Tish Harrison Warren names what many of us have experienced but few of us are willing to examine in ourselves. She writes:

“We have everyday habits, formative practices, that constitute daily liturgies. By reaching for my smartphone every morning, I had developed a ritual that trained me toward a certain end: entertainment and stimulation via technology. Regardless of my professed worldview or particular Christian subculture, my unexamined daily habit was shaping me into a worshiper of glowing screens. Examining my daily liturgy as a liturgy (as something that both revealed and shaped what I love and worship) allowed me to realize that my daily practices were malforming me, making me less alive, less human, less able to give and receive love throughout my day.”

Read that last line again.

Our phone habits are making us less able to give and receive love. This is not a minor inconvenience. This strikes at the heart of what it means to be human, what it means to follow Jesus, what it means to flourish. We were created for connection with God and with others. Our screens are quietly, persistently, relentlessly eroding our capacity for the very things we were made for.

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Think about it like water on a stone. A single drop does nothing. But water, dripping day after day, year after year, can carve through solid rock. Our phones work the same way. Each individual scroll session feels harmless. But the cumulative effect is catastrophic. We’re being hollowed out, our capacity for deep attention worn away, our ability to be fully present with God and with others slowly eroded until what remains is a shell of what we were meant to be.

The Noise That Drowns Out the Voice

There’s another numbing cost our devices subject us to. They don’t just steal our presence with others. They also steal our presence with God.

The Psalms speak of God’s voice in the stillness. “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). But when was the last time you were truly still? When was the last time you sat in silence long enough to give your undivided attention to something or someone beyond your own racing thoughts? When was the last time you set aside meaningful space for God to meet with you and speak to you?

We’ve become masters at filling nearly every gap with noise. Every waiting room, every commute, every grocery line, every quiet moment gets occupied by our screens by default. It seems we’re afraid of silence, of stillness, of being alone with our thoughts. And in our anxious fear, we’ve crowded out the One who often speaks in subtlety and in quiet places.

The prophet Elijah learned this in a personal way. He was expecting God to show up in the earthquake or the fire or the wind. But instead, God spoke to him in “a low whisper” (1 Kings 19:12). But who among us can hear a whisper when we’re drowning in digital noise?

Jesus himself modeled this rhythm for us. Again and again, the gospels tell us he withdrew to lonely places to pray (Luke 5:16). He prioritized solitude with the Father over the demands of the crowd. He understood what we can so easily forget: communion with God requires space, silence, and undistracted attention.

But we’ve traded contemplation for consumption. We’ve exchanged prayer for scrolling. We’ve substituted the presence of God for the presence of a screen. And we wonder why our souls feel dry, why our faith feels shallow, why God seems distant.

The tragic irony is this: we’re more “connected” than any generation in history, yet we’re more isolated from the source of life itself. We have constant access to information about God but diminishing access to God himself. We know more but experience less. We’re drowning in content about the spiritual life while being malnourished for actual communion with the living God.

The Way Back

So what do we do now? How do we find our way back to presence, to love, and to the Living God?

We have to name what’s happening. This isn’t about demonizing technology or retreating to some romanticized, unrealistic, pre-digital past. It’s about recognizing that our devices are not neutral. They’re shaping us, forming us, training us to love certain things and ignore others. And if we don’t examine these formative practices, we’ll wake up one day and discover we’ve become people we never intended to be.

We also have to create space. Real, protected, sacred space where screens are not allowed. Maybe it’s the dinner table. Maybe it’s the first hour of the morning. Maybe it’s every Lord’s Day from sunrise until evening. But somewhere, somehow, we need to carve out time and space where we can be fully present with God and with the people he has given us to love. Jesus invites us into this kind of life. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Notice what he offers: rest. Not stimulation. Not entertainment. Not distraction. Rest. The kind of soul-deep rest that can only be found in being with him. But we can’t come to him if we’re always going somewhere else in our minds. We can’t receive his rest if we never stop moving, scrolling, consuming. We have to put down the phone. We have to turn off the screen. We have to be still. It’s a spiritual discipline.

Beyond naming and creating space, we have to relearn the art of being present. For many of us, this will feel awkward, even painful at first. We’ve trained ourselves to reach for our phones the moment we feel bored or uncomfortable or uncertain. Mortifying that reflex takes time. It takes intention. It takes grace. But when we create space for God, he meets us there. When we show up fully for the people we love, intimacy deepens. When we practice stillness, we discover that God has been there all along. We just couldn’t hear him over the noise.

The two great commands (love God, love your neighbor) are not abstract principles. They’re practiced in the small, ordinary moments of our days. In the choice to put down the phone and look our spouse in the eye. In the decision to turn off the screen and pray. In the discipline of being fully present with our children instead of half-present while scrolling.

My friend saw his daughter’s drawing and grieved. He recognized himself in that image: turned away from what mattered most, captivated by a screen. And he made a change. Not a perfect change. Not an easy change. But a real one.

What would your child draw? What would the people you love see if they could capture your attention, your affection, your true devotion? Would they see someone fully present, or would they see someone turned away, staring at a screen?

The gospel offers us something better. Jesus offers us life abundant, life full, life overflowing with love for God and love for others (John 10:10). But we can’t grasp that life if our hands are always holding our phones. We can’t receive what he offers if we’re too distracted to notice.

Put down the phone. Look up. The people you love are right there, waiting. And so is God.