One day, the Internet will shut off suddenly and permanently for every person on the planet. No matter who you are or what you believe about the afterlife, you won’t be able to escape this reality. It won’t matter if your online platform is impressive or insignificant, how many people follow or troll you. You won’t take any of that with you.
We made some stickers with this phrase on them: There’s no internet in heaven. Then we passed them out to a crowd of several hundred people, and the reactions we got were very interesting. We stumbled on a little social experiment. The young people (20’s or teens) seemed curious about the statement and inquisitively pondered what it meant. Everyone older than that connected with the idea immediately, with enthusiastic Hallelujahs or Amens. Maybe they belonged to our generation, the Gen Xers, who were the last batch of humanity to reach full adulthood before the Internet.
There’s no internet in heaven.
I’ve been mulling on this concept for about a year as some things began to shift in our focus with Parents Who Fight. We’ve recently felt a more urgent need to approach the tech issues of the day through the lens of ministry instead of just safety and strategy. After nearly a decade of helping families, it has become painfully clear how technology can derail a young person’s life or even a whole family.
I began to ask God to give me understanding about how technology, tragedy, family, and eternity intersect. He led me to this scripture:
“And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul?” – Matthew 16:26
I remember someone saying that when you give a kid a phone, it’s like giving them the whole world to put in their back pocket. That single decision in a family’s life—to give a kid a phone—does indeed impact the child and the parent deeply. It indelibly changes the relationship dynamic and, in my opinion, can be the determining factor of when and how fast a child loses his or her innocence.
For those of us who fill the role of church camp counselor, how many times have we seen the following scenario? The Spirit is moving, kids are feeling the pull of the Lord during a ministry time so they line up for counselors to pray for them. From tearful sobs come stories of strongholds that originated on their phones. Young kids… 12, 13, 14. Most of them in that setting are Christians, whether or not they are living like it, they profess to know the Lord. But they are bound… they are not free. Eating disorders, pornography, suicidal thoughts, predators, anxiety and depression have invaded their young hearts and minds. Their souls.
When I engage kids about this idea, there’s no internet in heaven, I remind them that their body is temporary but their soul is eternal.
“Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” – 2 Corinthians 4:16-18
So why should we put so much time into the temporary trappings of life? And in comparison, how much time should we put into building the inward man, the soul… the one part of us that lives beyond this earth? Time is a precious resource, and it should reflect our priorities.
All of us have the choice every day to be present in the analog realities of life, and we will certainly be better for those choices in the here and now. We will know more peace and less anxiety when tethered to embodied experiences instead of disembodied virtual simulations of life. We have begun to accept on a societal level that the ubiquity of addictive technology has compromised our mental, emotional, and even physical health, but it’s time to focus on the impact of spiritual health as a primary concern of the worldwide church. A generation is at stake. The future of the church is at stake.
For parents and leaders who serve Jesus—may we not allow preoccupation with the virtual world to deter us from the most important work, which is to bring the eternal light of the Gospel to a hurting world.