One thing that distraction does is that it means we struggle to pray for any length of time. Even five minutes at a time would be a big improvement for many Christians.

What do you do when you have a few minutes with nothing to do? If you’re like most of the world, your tendency is to pull out your phone and scroll. It might be news, or social media, or email, but we have mainly loss the ability to just ‘be’. We need to fill the space.

The board behind Netflix knows this all too well. They discovered that their users have been watching shorter and simpler things rather than shows with more complex storylines. If a show continues for a while with no car chases or explosions, people stop watching and move to something else. Or they start scrolling on their phones instead of paying attention to the movie or TV show. Netflix asked their writers and directors to make content that is constantly engaging and to repeat key plot points often, assuming that most viewers have their attention divided between the TV and their phones.

Does that horrify you? I am guilty of this too, so I am not pointing the finger at everyone else! We cannot even concentrate on a movie if things are not repeated often and explained to death. All of this distraction is changing our minds and ruining our focus.

What do we lose when we move to our phones and scrolling so quickly, whatever is happening around us?

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