Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 16

In the last few years, “distracted driving” has become common parlance. We use the term primarily to refer to people irresponsible and inconsiderate enough to read and write electronic messages while driving.

Now some are witnessing “distracted doctoring” in hospitals. Stories are surfacing of neurosurgeons making personal phone calls while operating on a brain, technicians checking airfares or shopping on e-Bay or Amazon while running a heart bypass machine, anesthesiologists using the operating room computer to check basketball scores during surgery, and surgery nurses reading and writing personal e-mails on an operating room computer during a procedure.

Churches are witnessing what could be called “distracted devotion.” A cartoon in a religious journal, with no caption, depicts about ten congregants who have just shaken the minister’s hand at the end of a service and left the building. There they all are, including the minister, standing on the church lawn, looking not at each other but down at electronic devices, reading and writing text messages and updating Facebook information. No caption was needed.

Thirty years ago in his bestseller Megatrends, John Naisbitt predicted that the more high-tech life becomes, the greater will be our need for high-touch (skin-to-skin, face-to-face) antidotes. Naisbitt, a true prophet, foresaw that problem long before Steve Jobs created iPhones, iPads, and iPods, and Mark Zuckerberg friended us with Facebook.

The scene of churchgoers standing on the church lawn making love to words and images in little hand-held boxes stands as a symbol of what has become an addictive, shallow lifestyle for so many.

Should enthusiastically swapping trivia supplant quality time with people on life’s lawn, individuals we can physically reach out and touch right here and now?