I’ve discussed the danger of using our phones as a distraction, as well as why we shouldn’t feel guilty for having fun when it’s not turning into an idol. Now let’s wrap things up by figuring out whether we’re using something for God-honoring fun or self-glorifying distraction.
Why do we want distraction?
Most often, distraction is meant to save us from something. Whether we’re bored, dreading a task, anxious, depressed, or anything else, we turn to things like our phones or music to rescue us from something we don’t want to experience. Distraction is easy, which makes it ideal for when we don’t want something difficult or unpleasant in our lives at that moment.
Things like social media are especially useful for this because they let others do our living for us. We can use other people to show us a better life, make us laugh with funny pictures or stories, or give us a news article to read. Social media is a perfect example of distraction because it is a never-ending source of stuff that we can waste time on to temporarily fill an emptiness we feel inside. And whatever form it takes in our lives, distraction is ultimately meant to save us from something.
When we strip away our culture’s loving embrace of distraction, we can see some deep issues with it.
Distraction is our savior
After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:66-69)
Jesus Christ isn’t just meant to be important to us; He must be the ultimate thing in our lives. He is our source of joy, contentment, satisfaction, and even our identity. He is the One we rest in when we’re suffering, anxious, frustrated, or feeling hopeless. He isn’t just our Savior from the penalty of sin, but He continues to save us today.
Yet distraction so easily takes His place. We let YouTube save us from hopelessness, or spending time with friends becomes our escape from anxiety. We let distractions in this world temporarily save us from unpleasantness, yet we’ll never find ourselves free of them because we aren’t turning to the One who has the words of eternal life.
Entertainment is our idol
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:21)
A simple way to think about idolatry is that it’s not just about praying to statues, but instead, it’s anything that we love more than God. It may be difficult to see after a lifetime of living in our culture, but we absolutely worship entertainment. We’re like little children who don’t know how to simply rest, and instead cry out “I’m bored!” as we seek to fill every moment we can with being entertained.
We see the biggest issue with this when we seek entertainment at the expense of other responsibilities. Companies have had to block entire websites from their employees because they were spending so much of their working time on things like YouTube or Facebook. Kids are regularly fighting Mom and Dad’s phones for their parents’ attention. The picture of a father coming home from work and parking himself in front of the TV is all too real in many homes. The medical community has even created the term “text neck” to describe a growing medical problem in people who look at their phones too often.
We see all of this because of how much we love, serve, and worship entertainment. It’s where we spend our time, money, and health, and thus it reveals just how important it is to us. We believe the temporary enjoyment it brings is worth any suffering or pain it might otherwise cause. When we aren’t using wisdom, our lives can become wrapped up in our constant pursuit of this sort of distraction.
Poor theology of work
Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going. (Ecclesiastes 9:10)
Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, (Colossians 3:23)
Whether it’s an unpleasant task at work or a project around the house, it’s often tempting to get distracted so we can put it off. Knowing that we have to do what’s expected of us, we try to stall, feeling a slight sense of victory by putting things off just a bit longer.
The question, as always, is whether this pleases the Lord. Are we a unique testimony compared to our fellow workers who don’t know Christ, or would the boss be disappointed to see what the company is paying us to do? Are we showing our friends and family what diligence looks like, or do we teach them it’s okay to waste time on our phones or in front of the TV instead of accomplishing what we need to?
Following the world
Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. (Ephesians 4:17-19)
Perhaps we don’t see the big problem with distraction. After all, it’s the world we live in, right? We see our friends or family constantly craving distraction and assume that there’s some kind of happiness to be found there.
When we think about what it means to “follow after the world,” we often picture Christians needing to reject major social issues. Yet this need to be holy and separated from the world touches every area of our lives, including our quest for distraction. And just because the whole world is jumping off a bridge to avoid the realities of life doesn’t mean it’s a good thing for us.
Controlled by our emotions
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9)
… to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. (Ephesians 4:22-23)
Although seeking distraction is a choice we make, we may not often realize how frequently we do it. Our desire to avoid life is often just something we feel like doing. It seems good and enjoyable, so we don’t question our own motivations.
Yet if this discussion is being used by God to bring any sort of conviction, a good question to ask ourselves is “Why do I want to be distracted?” If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll find that we’ll waste hours of our day because we’re simply following our heart’s desires.
Yet as followers of Christ, we should immediately see the red flags and realize. As we examine ourselves, we’ll often find it’s our sin nature at work in driving us toward something other than Jesus Christ for rest and salvation from our circumstances. Our heart, as always, is calling something good that is leading us to even more pain and suffering as it pulls us away from our Savior.
We don’t value our time
So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. (Psalm 90:12)
Personally, this realization was my big “Aha!” moment as the Holy Spirit brought me true conviction on how important distraction can be in my own life. As children and adults, we’re rarely taught or encouraged to understand how limited and finite our time on Earth truly is. We spend time on distraction like someone who doesn’t understand money spends their paycheck. We waste it on immediate, temporary pleasures without realizing that by spending it in one place, we can’t spend it somewhere else that may be more important.
Yet when we take a full accounting of how much time we have throughout the day, understanding that things like God, family, and work deserve most of our time, we’ll realize how little time we actually have for silly distractions. We all have things we’d like to accomplish in life, yet so often we end the day thinking “Where did the time go?” And if we were to audit how we’ve spent our time over the last year, we’d realize that we’ve wasted hundreds of those hours on things with no value, often at the expense of growing closer to God, spending time with our family, or even just spending that time on things we truly enjoy.
When should we have fun?
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance; (Ecclesiastes 3:1-4)
We may think this passage is for the birds, but it’s a wonderful reminder that everything in our lives has its proper place. It’s not uncommon for most of us to live in constant extremes:
- We pour all of our time and energy into things that we feel behind on
- In time we get burnt out and feel like we need to drop everything and recover,
- While we recover, things around us get more and more out of control
- The cycle begins again as we spend all of our free time trying to catch up on everything we’re behind on
In times like these, 5 or 30 minutes of distraction become incredibly appealing. Whatever our motivation, the bottom line is that we just want something to pull us out of our circumstances. Whether it’s our phones, TV, or even alcohol, we just want a few moments of not feeling so overwhelmed.
Unfortunately, what feels good in that moment doesn’t really last. We may have hit the pause button, but the time we spent isn’t very satisfying and we may even regret it. It may not have been miserable, but it certainly wasn’t fun or enjoyable.
If we want to use our time well, how can we make sure our non-busy times are actually fun, rather than just distractions?
Although there are plenty of ways to think about this topic, I’ll suggest that the difference between fun and distraction comes down to that passage in Ecclesiastes. Is it time for work or our family, or is it time for fun? If watching YouTube is a distraction because we’re hiding from something else, then YouTube can be fun when we’ve dealt with the important things in life and we’re purposely choosing to use our free time watching funny animal videos.
In my previous article I discussed how God’s resting on the 7th day of creation shows us the importance of not rest, relaxaction, and even fun. Something else we can see in the pattern God set is when He rested. He didn’t speak reality into existence and then take a breather, nor did He stop halfway through His work. He did what He needed, and when He was done creating He finally rested.
We can apply that same principle to our own lives. Once our own responsibilities are done, we can give ourselves the freedom to have fun. We can enjoy our hobby without guilt, read a book and be fully immersed, or just go for a bike ride without the nagging guilt of things we should be doing.
We can even use social media for fun instead of as an escape. Although, interestingly, my own experience is that when I’m not getting on Facebook or Twitter to distract myself from life, it was incredibly difficult to enjoy myself. I kept asking myself “Is this really worth my limited time for fun right now?” The thing that once seemed like such a sweet relief just started tasting more like medicine that I had no interest in using for fun.
However, it’s important that we make sure we aren’t just setting limits for when we can have fun, but also when we must work. Whether it’s a paid job or just improvements around the house, we can always find something that needs to be done. And if we don’t set up boundaries for how much work needs to be done in a day, we end up living in an extreme of never resting and often feeling guilty for not getting everything done.
There’s a time for work and there’s a time for fun. Fun isn’t something we’re owed, but it’s still important in our lives when put in its proper place. Distraction often leaves us feeling guilty or unsatisfied, while using the fun time that we’ve earned will be refreshing, energizing, and enjoyable.
How do we tell the difference?
Although I hinted at it, I’d like to end by really clarifying how I see the difference between fun and distraction.
Distraction is a selfish endeavor. It’s all about avoiding responsibilities, perhaps even causing small, unseen amounts of damage to our relationship to our family, friends, or employer. It leaves us with guilt about wasting our time, and rarely do we look back and say “that was time well spent.”
Distraction is like wasting our money on fast food – it feels good at the moment, but our money and health would have been better spent elsewhere.
Fun, to the contrary, is about balance. It’s something that happens when a realistic amount of our obligations have been taken care of. It often enhances our relationship with friends or family because they are included in what we do, though at the very least we don’t hurt those relationships to pursue fun. We end our time feeling refreshed, and hopefully we’re pleased with how we spent our time (though something like a terrible movie may not allow for that).
Fun, in its proper place, is like eating dinner. It’s important for our health, it fills us up, and hopefully it’s an enjoyable experience all around.
I often discuss our time in terms of money. Both are limited resources; both are spent on things we need as well as things we love; and both can be wasted on foolish things if we aren’t mindful about our important expenses. If we think of distraction like impulsively buying things on Amazon, then fun is like saving up for something we know we want.
So in the end, all we can do is prayerfully evaluate how we’re spending our time. We don’t want to waste our time, nor do we want to feel guilty for having a bit of fun. It’s about using wisdom to find a proper balance that allows us to glorify God with all of our time – the time we spend working, as well as the time we spend enjoying the good things He’s given us.
