Grace-filled habit

During last year's digital detox experiments, I observed that one of the places that I app hop and scroll aimlessly was upon the throne. Yes, sitting on the toilet was the 'cue' that broke all my well-meant intentions to decrease my screen time. Even during the detox of non-essential apps, I was able to check the weather and my bank account religiously. Oh look, it's going to be cloudy in 3 hours when that debit clears!

Pre-detox and screen time-tracking, I was spending nearly 3 hours a day looking at my handheld device. That would be 21 hours a week. Nearly a day of a week spent doing...what exactly? Amassing cool ideas on Pinterest? Looking at other people's lives instead of living my own? Certainly I could find much better ways of spending 52 days a year, right? Theoretically?

Around the same time I had been reading how small, repetitive habits do more to shape who and what we become. How a thousand repeated actions make a groove in the brain that a singular resolution cannot undo by just stating intentions. What does spending nearly 1000 hours a year on my phone make me? Master scroller? Master of distraction? Master of social media? Master of inbox zero? Do I even want to earn this black belt? What sort of brain was I shaping? More importantly, how was this behavior forming my soul?  

Seeing as one of the best ways to kick a habit is to replace the action that follows the 'cue' with something else. Interrupt the circuit as it were with a more productive, beneficial behavior. (If you haven't read Atomic Habits yet, I'd highly recommend it.) I pondered how I used to while away the time in the water closet in the dark ages before smartphones and eureka! I used to read in there! So I decided to put a physical book within reach to try swapping the behavior. 

Then came the question of which book. It needed to have short enough sections that I didn't get sucked too deep into a story line, but long enough to make it through number 2. Remembering how I want my habits to form my soul, I settled upon Timothy Keller's Songs of Jesus-- a 365-day devotional through the Psalms. I committed to it for 2 months, but found that while I liked the rhythm, I didn't like how the snippets of 5-10 verses made me lose the flow and context of many of the Psalms.

A few weeks ago, I was listening to N.T. Wright on a podcast describe how Anglicans (and other Christian traditions) read through the Psalms monthly. I was intrigued, well to be honest my gut reaction was who has time for such lengthy reading these days?!? Which was shortly followed by the realization that I was someone wasting 3 hours a day on a phone, certainly I have time for a few Psalms... probably takes just as much time as when I get sucked into scrolling social media. Anyways, we happened to have an old copy of the Book of Common Prayer on the shelf at home and sure enough the Psalter was divided up conveniently into morning and evening readings for the entire month.

So I pitched the idea to the Farmer and we decided to give it a go. He listens to the morning Psalms en route to work, and I read them during my morning constitutional. Then we jointly read the evening Psalms over dinner. We're just getting started, so if you're curious ask us about it in a couple months how the experiment has gone. I have an inkling that we may have a new formative habit on our hands. Just a hunch.

I've heard it said of a handful of devout and well-admired Christians that if you cut them, they'd bleed Scripture. That mental picture has always stuck with me, and if I ever want such a moniker applied to me come my golden years I need to infill with Scripture over a lifetime. Reading the Psalms monthly seems like a good addition to regular Bible study to form my soul in the direction of that ideal.

Jesus spoke in Mark 7 that what comes out of us is a good indicator of our heart. If someone metaphorically cut you today, what would you bleed? Facebook newsfeed? Netflix binge? Political news? Celebrity gossip? What would you rather seep out?