The Lord said, “Make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it…Noah did everything just as God commanded him.” ~ Genesis 6:14, 22

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.” ~ Genesis 11:4

Noah’s ark and Babel’s tower represent two of the most iconic images in all of scripture, each speaking to us across millenia of how humans are, and are not, to relate to God, one another, and technology. What wisdom might these biblical stories offer us in the digital age?

On May 16th-17th, Corhaven is hosting a 24-hour digital detox that we are calling a “Tech Sabbath” (Learn more & Register).  At that retreat, together we will surrender our devices for 24 hours, in order to reflect together and individually on the question: How is the digital revolution impacting our spiritual formation? We hope you will join us!

In April, my wife and three of our children (ages 12, 15, and 17) spent a little under 72 hours together in a cabin butted up against the Shenandoah National Park. Our family, like every other family (and individual) I know, has a fraught relationship with the devices we carry in our pockets in order to ensure access to what Andy Crouch calls “easy everywhere.”

The long weekend was not initially intended as a tech detox, but last minute, as we packed up the van, on something of a whim (with my wife’s blessing, of course) I announced, “All digital devices will remain in the car for the duration of this weekend.” The particularity of leaving the devices, not at home but in the car was strategic. I knew I would have no idea of how to find our cabin without google maps!

Despite initial groans and eye rolls, I was pleasantly surprised at how our three teenage children ultimately embraced the experiment. Before long, we found ourselves in a small log cabin with nothing but musical instruments, playing cards, board games, food, and creation itself vying for our attention.

In the two iconic culture shaping stories of Noah’s ark and Babel’s tower, the role of technological breakthrough was present. Noah in constructing and waterproofing wood for a massive life preserving ark. Babel in baking the bricks, and mixing the mortar necessary to create a multi-story tower. The distinctive that makes one a cautionary tale and the other an exemplary one is not the application of technology, but the aims of their attention.

At the Tower of Babel attention was given to making “a name for ourselves” and aim was set therefore “to reach the heavens” (apart from God). For Noah, and (presumably) his family, attention was aimed at God’s purposes, and the aim was therefore obedience to God’s voice.

Today there is an economic war being waged between the largest multi-national corporations in history. The battles waged are to get an ever larger piece of the pie that we now call the “attention economy”. The attention economy is what happens when the supply of nearly unlimited digital information must be funneled into the very limited attention spans of actual humans. Psychologist and economist Herbert A. Simon first wrote about the concept of the attention economy in 1971. He noted the link between information overload and attention scarcity, when he wrote these haunting words, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Why does attention matter for us as Christians, what role does it play in the Bible? One of the Hebrew words that is often translated as “worship” in the Old Testament is Avodah which can also be translated as “work”, or “service.” The common denominator of worship, work, and service is something that one must attend to. You cannot truly serve someone without knowing their need, you cannot complete any workmanship without attending to the details, and you cannot worship God, while distracted by the world. In the Bible there is very little difference between attention and worship (see Psalm 27).

I’d love to say this little detox was just what we needed to solve our families fraught relationship to our devices, but I’d be lying. However, the gift this device-free long weekend gave to our family was regarding our attention. By clawing back our attention from the potential to digitally access anyone or anything at any time from anywhere, our attention rather, was focused on physical and social access to one another and the creation that surrounded us. The most tangible good that came out of it was the discovery, for the first time in our families history, of a card game we all truly love to play together. And, trust me, when you are a father raising digital natives, where Spotify competes against conversation, and even family movie night is less enticing than YouTube, a simple card game, where eye contact is plentiful, laughter is shared together, and familial teasing abounds, is a victory worth writing home about.

Since the days of Noah, through to the digital Babylon of today, humans have been amplifying our capacity in every direction through technology. Whether we obediently build arks to preserve the life of God’s design, or defiantly build towers to engrandise our own name is largely determined by what we give our attention to.

We hope you will join us as for 24 hours as we set aside our devices in order to pay attention to what we are paying attention to.