Spirituality and Technology……and my Confession of Materialism

As I get off of my plane that just landed at RDU I begin to reach into my pocket to grab my cell phone when I remember that it is in my backpack and totally off limits.  How will I call my roomate to pick me up?  How did people live without cell phones????????  And this was only the first day of my fast from communication technology………….

One of our assignments for my Spirituality class this semester was to fast from communication technology for five straight days.  This meant no cell phone, no email, no facebook and so on. 

I just completed my fast and a lot of people keep asking me how my fast went and what it was like to give up communication technology.  I mean, how can someone live without facebook, honestly???

To be honest, I’m still sorting through these questions as I write my reaction paper. 

I do want to discuss the biggest scare during my entire fast……….

When I gave up my cell phone I feel like I gave up a part of me.  The whole week I felt as though there was a part of me missing and this began to scare me.

When did this happen?  How did my cell phone become that much a part of me? Is this healthy? 

I just can’t believe that my emptiness without a cellphone is healthy.  As I began to wrestle with this I began to realize that I need to confess that I am very materialistic.

It is something that I continue to fight each and every day.  I mean, I grew up in a culture that told me ”what I had made me who I was.”  This lie was fed to me each and every day as I grew up in the suburbs of Orlando. Sure I had lots of things, but now that I look back these had to be the most depressing days of my life.  I started to believe that what I had made me who I was.  My identity was in my “things.”  My Dad told me that I said one time that I should be able to “have whatever I want.”  That thought frightens me and it has taken me a long time to try and free myself from this destructive way of thinking. 

My good friend Will and I are going to write a book in the future and one of our chapters will be titled “Alabama boys on the Tampa Bayou.”  This comes from an experience that we had with two guys who got stranded in Tampa.  Their friend left them behind with nothing but the clothes on their backs. 

We had many great experiences with these two friends of ours, but there is one experience in particular that I remember like it was yesterday.  One night, they found a spot to sleep right under a bridge on the river in downtown Tampa so we bought a couple of pizzas and headed down to hang out with them.  It was a little cold out that night and as we left I offered one of them my jacket.  What he said to me would change a lot about how I think about my ”stuff.” He said, “no     you    keep     it.    you    might    need    it.”  The only thought that went through my mind after this was:  If he could only see my closet.  I felt so ashamed……

But, I learned something very important that night from our friend who had nothing but the clothes on his back.  He taught me that it is not what you have that makes you who you are, it is how you respond to the people who “might need it” that makes you who you are. 

As I took my hand out of my pocket where my cell phone was absent I remembered our friend out there on the river that one night………

How many times do I still define myself with what I have?