Faithbase

Hey everybody, this is the Full Vantage Podcast. My name is Trevor Lovingood and this is my attempt to share the lessons I've learned over the past decade of building and creating community from scratch because relationships really do matter and I'm in a new city right now and I'm starting over again. So how can you begin wherever you are and build those types of communities, cultures, and relationships? Here we go, let's have some conversations. Ready? In three, two. This episode is about digital rest and what I have learned lately concerning digital rest. I think digital rest is unique, I think digital rest is important, and I think digital rest will actually change your real life. So this is a big deal, we're gonna jump into it because I've never taken a true digital rest before so let's talk about it. Cool, like that? Awesome, let's do it. Last week I took a mini vacation or a real vacation or a big vacation because some people take months off, some people take days off, some people take hours off, they call it a vacay. Some people fake vacation by taking weeks and then they work on vacation which is not really a vacation so I just wanna call a time out on however you take vacation and I wanna talk about a dynamic that I think is going to help us find rest for the real world that we are living in and I call it digital rest. I think people are talking a lot about mental health, there's a lot of conversation about how do we take a Sabbath as we follow Jesus and when do you take Sabbath and is it on Saturday, is it a Sunday, or is it a day of the week, or is it a mindset and there's a ton of biblical things, there's a ton of practical self-help life ways but I just wanna tell you what I've experienced and then I wanna tell you some things I noticed that I wasn't expecting when I took a rest because this was not a mindful one meaning I didn't come into the vacation thinking I was going to be doing this so this was forced on me. I have never done this before. I have never taken six days to not have wifi service and to not have cell service and to not have my phone in my pocket. I've never done that before. Everywhere I've been, everywhere I've gone, I have had my phone or I've had wifi or I've had a way to connect or it wasn't very long, you know what I'm saying? Maybe it was a day or two but I've never done this for six days and I wanna tell you some things I learned and some things I think will be really powerful for us to think about it. I don't think that this, this is not an extensive list. This is not necessarily even gonna happen for everyone. I just wanna tell you some things that happened to me that really changed the game for me and the first is this. I needed to have it forced on me, I realize this meaning I needed to put myself in a position and I need to regularly put myself in positions where I do not have work available to work on or I do not have anything digital really demanding my time and it's not that I even feel a slave, if you will, to my phone or I feel like I am attached to my phone or things of digital nature because I don't even wanna say that that's where I am because I don't think that's right and I don't think that's true but what I have found is that I do touch my phone on a regular basis and I think like when we have our phones we have like ghost calls or ghost texts or ghost notifications. You know, when you think you feel your phone vibrate and you just pick it up and wanna look at it because it's something that you do and it's like it didn't vibrate, no one texted you, there wasn't a notification, you just saw the time of day and your backdrop on your screen's here, you know? But we do this and we touch our phones, I think it's like over 20 times a day if you have a phone on you, you're known to touch it. I don't know the exact stat but it's something like that and you could even keep track yourself if you'd like but anyways, what happened to me is I needed to be in a place where there was no wifi, where the wifi didn't work good, where I needed to put myself in a position where there was no cell service and here's why I needed it because I needed to find digital rest and here's what I learned. I learned that the first thing that changed that was the most important thing for me were the people around me. So I was there with my family, three kids, wife and what I found out was that my kids actually changed because of this rest and my wife actually changed because of this rest toward me and I haven't even pinned exactly what the change is and why the change happened but I'm giving a little bit credit to this digital rest but I think it's because they had my full attention. There was nothing in my pocket that was going to pull me away, work, important things, emails, text messages, phone calls, important people, other family members trying to call me but knowing that my immediate family had my undivided attention seemed to be very, very powerful and so first and foremost, the thing that around me that changed most that I care about most was my relationships and the attitudes and the connectivity that I had with the people I care about most, my immediate family, my kids and my wife. Second thing is this, it adjusted my thoughts to be both longer and bigger and also closer and more immediate and here's what I mean by that, longer and bigger. Meaning I was able to not allow the things that are urgent from other people's perspective or even urgent to me affect me and get me to have short thinking. Meaning I was able to take time and space because I wasn't attached to something that was demanding myself digitally but I was able to stretch the timeframe and live longer in the future and think about what is my impact for the next 100 years or think about things that were way down the road but a lot of times, I'm able to get there if I'm gonna set aside time to dream or think but then the next thing that's scheduled in my phone begins to come up or scheduled in my life begins to come up and I immediately stop the thought and I go to the next thing but I was able to live there with longevity and dream and think and my thoughts were able to stay there and then when they needed to be adjusted and I was able to walk away from that situation or that moment, they actually, in a lot of ways, those things affected me in my present because there wasn't other things that were demanding me of my time, thought, energy and effort and it was really powerful because I found myself being able to be both in the future and in the present and this is what I mean by more immediate is and things were closer. I was not trying to solve equations that are people meaning people are not equations to solve and people are not problems, they have problems and I am not the great fixer of all things in people's lives and I actually can't fix anyone. I can just walk with people and I actually don't solve problems, I just walk with people in the middle of those problems and then either the Lord comes in and really heals them and solves them or they end up being a part of the solution and having discipline. So what happened was everything got way closer and way immediate and I saw this in an amazing way because I wasn't moving on to the next thing. Like I said that for the future thing, I move on quickly from like dreams, thoughts, aspirations, goals but even in the immediate, I wasn't moving on to the next thing, thought, activity. I was with those people and I was able to go to the next activity or closeness of thought and I was able to see progress be made in my three-year-old, in my seven-year-old, in the moments that I was actually in when they were right around me. So what happened as I was taking digital rest, I was able to be both thoughtful in the future and thoughtfully present at the same time and I wasn't stressed about letting the urgency of the immediate cut those thoughts off and I just thought that this was really, really powerful for me because as I was able to keep a string of thought, I found myself having quantity of experiences like I've never had before and I think that I schedule a lot in my days and I honestly feel like I get a lot done but the third thing that I really found was I was doing so much every day and yet I was able to keep a train of thought that was valuable in the future and valuable in the present and I was having experience with those thoughts and with the people that I was around or being alone in a river fishing or horseback riding with my daughter and it was really powerful because the quantity of experiences were extensive because I wasn't trying to think about or have the experiences of an email or of a social media post or of a phone call. All these things can be really valuable and really be really important to us but I was experiencing the life that I actually had not thinking or planning about the life that I don't have yet or the location that I'm not currently in. A lot of times we plan, we schedule, we dream in locations that we actually never end up in or never go or places we never visit and those are fine because those are inspirational and I'm not trying to be negative even about this but there's something to be said about resting right where you are and having experiences.