Bronwyn Lea
May 20, 20213 min
One seems to focus on image and beauty (which everyone knows is skin deep), while the other reveals images of what’s deep beyond the skin. They don’t seem to have much in common at all. But recently I’ve been wondering…
I gave up social media for Lent this year. Practicing Lent—by giving up or adding something for 40 days before Easter—wasn’t something I’d really done before, despite coming from an Anglican background. But this year I felt an invitation from the Lord to try something new: to give up a habit and then pay attention to what I might learn about myself and God in that time.
Within the first week, I noticed how often my reflex was to pick up my phone “just to check if anything was happening.” I noticed my distractibility. By the following week, I began to observe some deeper things. Positively, I noticed how sometimes what drew me online was a desire to connect - to share something joyful, or concern for how someone was doing. But negatively, I noticed I was drawn online when I was avoiding conflict, or feeling sorry for myself and wanted people’s praise, or when I wanted to vent. Pride, insecurity, and laziness were the undercurrent. It was a sobering look in the mirror.
Meanwhile, instead of scrolling on my phone, I made generous use of the library. I read a book about Marie Curie and her pioneering work in radioactivity. She was not only the first woman to win the Nobel Prize but also the first person to win it twice! During World War 1 she developed mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals: lifesaving and life changing work. She was an indefatigable researcher: her 40 years of work interrupted only by long periods of a persistent worsening illness they could not identify or treat.
You and I know now what Marie Curie couldn’t have known about what was making her so sick: those mesmerizing test tubes of glow-in-the-dark isotopes she carried in her pocket were also slowly eating away at her body. The incredible thing she was handling was also unwittingly killing her. She just didn’t know it at the time. It took years for the slow poison to reveal the damage it had done.
It didn’t quite take years—just a few weeks of Lent—to realize that our newsfeeds might be a bit like radium for us. We work with the stuff (which is mesmerizing and has changed our lives for the better in many ways), meanwhile it can be eating us away on the inside before we’re aware we’re dying from over-exposure.
Taking breaks helped Curie recover long enough to continue. Taking breaks from our newsfeed does the same for us. And, with hindsight, we also now know that if you’re going to work with radioactivity, you need to limit exposure. With Lent over and me back in the world of media, I want to make sure I have healthy protections in place: time limits, as well as regular health “checkups” (like observing the weekly screen time summary I get on my phone, and taking time in stillness to see how those negative drivers of anger, boredom, or pride might be sending me scrolling rather than to Jesus.
Like Curie, we carry something glowing and powerful in our pockets. Let’s make sure it isn’t eating away at us from the inside.
Yours on the Jesus-journey,
Bronwyn Lea
Pastor of Women and Discipleship