Pause, Pray, Proceed: The Cure For Busyness, Pt. 3
The Night MLK Couldn’t Sleep
The date is December 1st, 1955. In the waning hours of dusk, as the sun set on another 60-degree southern evening, a 42-year-old seamstress named Rosa Parks stepped onto a bus and changed the world. She took her seat in the section marked “colored,” in keeping with the segregationist policies of her small town, and soon the bus began to fill up. Every seat was eventually taken, and later on the route, several white men boarded with nowhere to sit. The driver demanded that Parks, along with others in the “colored” section, give up their seats. But while two people near her chose to move, Parks, all of 5’3”, refused. The police were called, and she was arrested. She lost her job. She became a target of vicious ridicule. And almost overnight, the national spotlight fell on Montgomery, Alabama. Four days later, a group of Christian ministers in the city formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to organize against this kind of treatment, and they chose a young, charismatic minister to lead it: Martin Luther King, Jr.
Fast forward a month, and despite the association’s best efforts, very little had changed. Boycotts weren’t working, the city government wouldn’t budge, and King himself had a target on his back. On January 26, 1956, he was arrested for driving 30 mph in a 25 mph zone and jailed overnight. When he finally got home, he found dozens of anonymous death threats waiting for him—over the phone, in notes, in letters threatening violence against his family, even rumors of a bomb planted under their house. That night he couldn’t sleep. All the noise from the radio, the television, and the phone felt overwhelming. So he got out of bed, walked to the kitchen, and made himself a cup of coffee. And then, away from all the noise and distraction, he sat down and prayed. Years later, in a sermon, he described that night:
“And I bowed down over that cup of coffee — I never will forget it. I prayed out loud that night, I said, ‘Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right; I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now; I’m faltering; I’m losing my courage.’ And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness, stand up for justice, stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’ And I’ll tell you, I’ve seen the lightning flash. I’ve heard the thunder roll. I felt sin-breakers dashing, trying to conquer my soul. But I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me. And I’m going to go on believing in Him.”
King later said that his role in the Civil Rights movement really began that night, away from the busyness and distraction of the world around him. It was in the quiet that he understood who God was, who he was, and what his life needed to look like.
It happened in the quiet, not in the busy. King’s story is a striking example of what the author Edith Wharton called “the power of sustained attention”: a state where our hearts and minds are deeply, deliberately attentive to God and to our own souls. And his story exposes something troubling about our culture: the formative spaces of quiet, the moments of margin where sustained attention becomes possible, have almost entirely disappeared. The very conditions that shaped people like King, William Wilberforce, St. Francis, and Jesus himself toward lives of love, peace, and justice are, for most of us, gone.
Living in the Attention Economy
Part of the reason is that we live in a digital age with more competing for our attention than ever before. Economists have a name for it: the “attention economy.” Companies and platforms have built entire business models on one goal: capturing and holding our attention, around the clock, primarily through our devices.
That’s not just my observation as an outsider. Some of the people who built our present digital world have explicitly named this.
Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, described the platform’s founding motivation this way:
“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and comments. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains. It’s a social-validation feedback loop, exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
When the CEO of Netflix was recently asked to name the company’s greatest competitor, he answered simply: “Sleep.”
Then there’s Tristan Harris, a computer scientist once called “the closest thing the tech industry has to a conscience” by The Atlantic. While working at Google, Harris began to see the harmful, unchecked effects the technology he was building had on human brains, so he left and founded a nonprofit called the Center for Humane Technology. In a 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, he described our digital age as a kind of “human downgrading”: not improvement, but decline. He argues that the constant noise of our devices has created an interconnected system of mutually reinforcing harms: addiction, distraction, isolation, polarization, misinformation. All of these crowd out any space for quiet, focused attention and replace it with distraction. He calls it an “arms race for our attention,” deliberately militaristic language.
And the data suggests we’re losing that arms race:
The average millennial with a smartphone spends more than five hours a day on it.
Researchers have identified a real phenomenon called Phantom Vibration Syndrome: the sensation that your phone is buzzing when it isn’t. As one researcher put it, “Through bodily habit your phone has actually become a part of you.”
Twenty-five years ago, the average human attention span was 12 seconds. Today it’s roughly 8 seconds, shorter than a goldfish’s, at 9 seconds.
Oxford tech ethicist James Williams put it starkly:
“We are living through the largest, most standardized, most centralized form of attention control in human history.”
We’re losing our capacity to be attentive to others, to ourselves, and to God, because our attention keeps getting pulled somewhere else: another scroll, another email, another video.
The Toll on Our Souls
This loss of quiet, sustained attention is taking a real toll on our inner lives. The writer Andrew Sullivan once checked himself into a “digital detox” center, not because he considered himself religious, but simply to disconnect. What he found, without his attention constantly diverted to his phone, was an opening into a kind of spiritual depth and peace he hadn’t expected. In his essay “I Used to Be a Human Being,” he wrote:
“Modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn… If churches came to realize that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation.”
Without quiet, sustained attention on God and our souls, our spiritual lives are headed toward ruin. If we keep practicing the cultural default of busyness and distracted attention, we simply cannot build a deep life of wholeness with God.
This is the key issue at the heart of this short essay series, The Cure for Busyness: these are an attempt to name how Scripture speaks into our propensity toward distraction, and what practices might actually serve as a cure. This piece wraps up that series by turning to the most obvious source of busyness in our lives: our technology.
To be clear up front: Scripture has nothing directly to say about smartphones or social media. I’m not here to argue we should all become luddites and smash our phones against a wall (though for some of us, that might not be the worst idea). Nor am I nostalgic for some pre-modern golden age. The Bible isn’t opposed to using technology well and wisely.
But the Bible does have a great deal to say about our attention, about how our bodies, minds, and souls are shaped by what we give our attention to. The cure for the busyness and distraction of our digital age isn’t a new behavior or a blanket rejection of technology. It’s a reorientation of our attention toward the right things, in the right way. And there may be no more concise expression of that idea than Paul’s words to the early church in Colossae — Colossians 3:1-4:
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
The Context: A Church Under Pressure
In the earliest years of the church, there was a persistent tension in the lives of Jesus’ followers.
On one hand, these were people radically transformed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus — a transformation Paul references directly in this passage when he writes, “You have died” and “you have been raised.” The earliest Christians understood that part of Jesus’ message was that there is a way of being human that leads to death and unhealth: a self-driven way, in which we act as our own gods, defining good and evil on our own terms, often at the expense of others. All of us show symptoms of this instinct in our pride, greed, envy, and all the death and decay visible in our world.
But the message of Jesus doesn’t start or end with death. It starts and ends with the claim that there is a way of being human that leads to life and wholeness, that we were made to live in loving unity with God, with others, and with the world. Though we’ve all taken the road of self-driven decay, Jesus’ central message was that new life was available in and through him. Because of what he accomplished in his life, death, and resurrection, we can die to our self-drivenness and be raised into the life we were actually made for. As N.T. Wright puts it:
“You need to die and be raised. You need to come out altogether from the shadowy powers that operate within the present creation, doomed as it is to decay and perish. You need to belong instead to God’s new world, the new creation that is being brought in to replace the old. The truly human life you seek — the life of a genuine, glad holiness that runs right through the personality — is to be found in that new world.”
That truth transformed the earliest Christians. They broke down political, ethnic, and gender boundaries. They cared for the poor and marginalized when almost no one else did. They confessed, forgave, and loved their enemies. It made the church an unprecedented community in world history, going from virtually nonexistent in 10 CE to more than 20 million adherents by 310 CE, by some historians’ estimates nearly half the population of the Roman Empire. The historian Kenneth Scott Latourette wrote:
“Never in so short a time has any other set of ideas, religious, political, or economic, without aid of physical force or of social or cultural prestige, achieved so commanding a position in such an important culture.”
So on one hand, these were transformed people transforming the world, their attention fixed on Jesus. But that’s not the whole story.
On the other hand, these same Christians regularly battled cultural pressures pulling their attention away from Jesus: religious legalism around food, sacrifice, and circumcision; social pressures toward domination and hierarchy that fractured unity and equality in the church; political pressure to conflate loyalty to Rome with worship of Jesus; and ordinary moral pressures toward anger, malice, and greed common to the culture around them.
Much of the New Testament wrestles with exactly this tension. One scholar has summarized many of these letters into four short moves: Grace to you. I thank God for you. Hold fast to the gospel of Jesus’ love and grace. And, for the love of everything holy, stop doing stupid stuff.
Colossians was written in the middle of that tension. Paul wrote it from prison, after being visited by Epaphras, who was pastoring the church in Colossae and brought Paul a report about both the beauty and the ugliness present in that community. Colossians 3:1-4 is, in many ways, a summary of everything Paul has been building toward in the letter: in the middle of a culture full of distractions, he says, there is one thing you need to fine-tune: your attention. Refocus on Jesus.
In this response, Paul answers a question that’s just as urgent now as it was then: How do we live as followers of Jesus in a world constantly pulling our attention in other directions? He gives two instructions, both flowing out of Jesus’ death and resurrection:
Seek the things that are above.
Set your minds on the things that are above.
Seek the Things That Are Above
“To seek,” as Paul uses the word here, describes a consistent, steady orientation of attention, something holistic and ongoing. To seek is to search for, to ask questions about, to learn, to endeavor to obtain, to have your eyes and ears and heart attuned and guided by something.
There’s a sport called orienteering that illustrates this well. A course is laid out across unfamiliar terrain, with markers scattered throughout. Each competitor gets a compass and a map of the landscape—sometimes easy terrain, sometimes rough— and has to move efficiently through the course, hit every marker, and return to the start. It takes athleticism, creativity, and mental fortitude, but above all, it requires trust in the map and compass. There’s no way to succeed without being guided by them.
Paul is reminding his readers that a life of health, wholeness, peace, and joy comes when our attention is consistently oriented in the right direction, toward the right map and compass. That’s what he means by “the things that are above.”
This isn’t a call to withdraw from the world into some distant, cloud-based heaven. Paul undermines that assumption a few verses later, when he turns to talk about living out certain virtues here and now. Seeking, for Paul, happens in the middle of the world, not as an escape from it.
“Things above,” in other words, isn’t a geographic location: it’s the reality of Jesus’ kingdom, which he embodied during his time on earth. Paul is essentially rephrasing Jesus’ own command to “seek first the kingdom of God.” He’s saying to become the kind of person who, more and more each day, lets Jesus’ way and life shape you — because that way and life is where lasting peace actually lives. And you do that through very practical, present-tense choices:
Giving your time and energy to those more vulnerable than you.
Advocating for the marginalized.
Giving up power for the sake of your neighbor.
Devoting yourself to prayer and regular connection with God.
In a world of terrain constantly pulling our attention in every direction, our response is to reorient ourselves toward life with God. William Barclay put it well in his commentary on Colossians:
“Paul is certainly not pleading for an other-worldliness in which the Christian withdraws himself from all the work and activities of this world and does nothing but contemplate eternity… From now on the Christian will view everything against the background of eternity and no longer live as if this world was all that mattered. This will obviously give him a new set of values. Things which the world thought important, he will no longer worry about. Ambitions which dominated the world will be powerless to touch him. He will go on using the things of the world but he will use them in a new way. He will, for instance, set giving above getting, serving above ruling, forgiving above avenging. The Christian’s standard of values will be God’s not men’s.”
Seeking, Applied to Our Tech
This practice—orienting our attention rightly—is the only real way to get underneath our habits of busyness and distraction with our devices, because it lets us examine the reasons for our tech use, not just the habit itself. Our devices aren’t inherently the problem. They’re inanimate objects, entirely within our control: you can, in fact, turn off your phone. But a device becomes an extension of our own inner and outer problems when we reach for it without first asking why.
So often we turn to our devices out of some unresolved hurt or pain:
We post on social media not out of love for God or others, but out of an insecurity that craves the dopamine hit of crowd affirmation.
We stream a show not out of peace and presence with God, but out of a desire to bury hard emotions, challenges, or wounds.
We compulsively check email not to become people of life and love, but because we’ve located our identity in the productivity of our work.
Those behaviors will never actually satisfy us. Our deepest insecurities are meant to be met by the knowledge that we’re beloved by God, not by how popular, attractive, or funny we are. Our deepest wounds are meant to be healed by Christ entering into them, not distracted away from. Our identity is meant to be secured by the fact that God’s Spirit tells us we are enough, not by worldly accomplishment or productivity telling us so.
The problem isn’t, intrinsically, the device. The problem is that we give it our attention for the wrong reasons. That’s why we so often finish a stretch of time with our tech feeling more confused, numb, anxious, or lonely than when we started, not more refreshed, not more aware of the love of God and others.
It’s because our orientation is off. We’re seeking the wrong things. We haven’t placed the truth of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection before our hearts and minds. Instead we’ve let our attention be pulled toward a screen that promises more than it can deliver.
So there’s a simple question worth asking ourselves as we pick up a device: What am I seeking right now? Am I seeking the things above: love of God and others, peace, joy, justice, goodness, gentleness? Or am I seeking fleeting pleasure, numbing, validation, or relief from insecurity? Learning to ask that question honestly, before we act, is where the real work begins. And that process is exactly what Paul describes next, when he tells us to “set our minds on things that are above.”
Set Your Minds on Things That Are Above
To “set your mind” on something means to think deliberately about how you engage with the world. One definition puts it this way: “to employ one’s faculty for thoughtful planning, with emphasis upon the underlying disposition or attitude.”
In other words: think. Don’t drift along, mindlessly absorbing the consumerism, anxieties, and insecurities of the culture around you. Become someone who thinks clearly about God, about your soul, about the world, and about how your use of technology shapes all of it.
That’s a genuinely countercultural posture right now. We are not, by and large, people who pause to consider where our attention is going and why. In a recent Microsoft study, 77% of people agreed with the statement: “When nothing else is occupying my mind, the first thing I do is reach for my phone.”
The moment we’re confronted with a pause, a gap that might bring our attention back to God, to life, to love, to the state of our souls, and we run from it almost instinctively. For many of us, the reason we don’t feel the presence and peace of God isn’t that we don’t want God, or that something sinister is at work in us. It’s simply that our attention is too scattered to actually hear and know God. We haven’t set our minds on him; we’ve rushed to set them on something else.
What you give your attention to is what will shape you the most. That’s precisely why so many companies want your attention: because whoever has it, has you. We become what we attend to. If we want to become people of deep love, joy, peace, and goodness, we need to become people who set our minds on Christ—his way, his work, his kingdom, in everything we do. Dallas Willard writes:
“The first and most basic thing we can and must do is to keep God before our minds. This is the fundamental secret of caring for our souls. Our part in thus ‘practicing the presence of God’ is to direct and redirect our minds constantly to Him. In the early time of our ‘practicing’ we may well be challenged by our burdensome habits of dwelling on things less than God. But these are habits — not the law of gravity — and can be broken. A new, grace-filled habit will replace the former ones as we take intentional steps toward keeping God before us. Soon our minds will return to God as the needle of a compass constantly returns to the north. If God is the great longing of our souls, He will become the pole star of our inward beings.”
How We Actually Do This: Pause, Pray, Proceed
This all sounds good in principle, but tech is sneaky. Most of us don’t realize we’ve fallen into the attention trap until we’re twenty minutes deep into some clickbait article we didn’t mean to read.
Much of the tech industry has, whether consciously or not, built its strategy on the model of the slot machine. Slot machines in the U.S. generate more revenue than Major League Baseball and the film industry combined, and the mechanism is simple: small, seemingly inconsequential dopamine hits, over and over—a quarter here, a buck there—that hook people through the sheer repetition of possible reward. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
Tech often works the same way. A small, seemingly inconsequential post, video, or message gives us a dopamine hit that instinctively makes us want a little bit more, and then a little bit more. Most of us are carrying a small slot machine around with us everywhere we go.
There’s a simple, three-part practice that can help us fight back, a way of learning to seek and set our minds on the right things, in the right way:
Pause. When you feel the urge to open your phone, or a specific app, or click on something, pause first. Ask: What am I seeking here? What am I giving my attention to? Will this help me love God and others well? Will it bring life, beauty, and joy into the world? That small pause tends to surface motivations and hopes we didn’t realize were driving us.
Pray. After pausing, take a few seconds to pray. Ask for God’s presence in the moment. If you’re about to reach for something out of the wrong motivation, ask God to meet you there and remind you of Christ’s love and grace, so you don’t fall into old lies about insecurity or unworthiness.
Proceed. After praying, decide how to move forward. Sometimes that means engaging with the technology in front of you, it isn’t inherently bad, and if you’re seeking and setting your mind on the right things, it can genuinely add to your life. Other times, it means putting the device down, because the pause and the prayer revealed you were chasing the wrong thing in the wrong way.
Build this rhythm into your life: pause, pray, proceed. Slowly and consistently, it will move you out of the busyness of distraction and into quiet, focused attention on the things that actually matter.
Conclusion
The biologist E.O. Wilson once wrote: “The real problem of humanity is that we have stone-age emotions and brains, medieval institutions, and God-like technology.”
Many of us have become people with hijacked attention. Our tech has, in a real sense, become our god, ever with us, ever around us, ever beckoning. But it’s a bad god. It will always overpromise and underdeliver. We need to reclaim our attention in the quiet and margin of our lives. We need to become people who seek the kingdom, because that’s where we find health. We need to become people who set our minds on the right things, in the right ways.
We need to become people who pause, who pray, and who proceed. Because when we do, it leads to life, for us and for the people around us. In the busyness of this week, maybe the most radical thing we can do is something the world around us has largely forgotten how to do: pay attention to the right things.