Worship calls us out of the small pleasures of an easy-everywhere world to the real joy and burden of bearing the image of God in a world where nothing is easy, everything is broken, and yet redemption is possible.

All true conversations, really, are risks, exercises in improvisation where we have to listen and respond without knowing, fully, what is coming next, even out of our own mouths.

But overconsumption of distraction is just as unsatisfying, and ultimately sickening, as overconsumption of junk food.

In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that the more you entertain children, the more bored they will get.

Heart, mind, soul, and strength all are nurtured while we sleep.1

And begin filling the space that is left over with opportunities for creativity and skill, beauty and risk.

We will have to teach our children, from early on, that we are not here as parents to make their lives easier but to make them better. We will tell them—and show them—that nothing matters more to our family than creating a home where all of us can be known, loved, and called to grow.

Here is the heart of the paradox: Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who can create and cultivate as we were meant to.

If our families are to be all that they are meant to be—schools of wisdom and courage—they will have to become more like the church, households where we are actively formed into something more than our culture would ask us to be.