Fasting is a spiritual discipline that people of faith have practiced for thousands of years. Today, fasting is often understood too narrowly as only skipping a meal and donating the value to a food pantry or abstaining from chocolate during Lent. Spiritual fasting can be so much more.

Spiritual fasting is the deliberate abstention from something that is actually available to us but might distract us from God. Whatever keeps us busy and captivates our time, energy, and attention receives a time-out that allows for an unhurried and obedient listening to what God has to say.

I bet you have a good idea as to what mundane things keep you busy and captivate your time, energy, and attention. But if you need a reminder, here are some frightening statistics from www.digitialdetox.org:

• 30% of leisure time is devoted to perusing the Web.
• 50% of people prefer to communicate digitally rather than in person.
• 150 is the average number of times that a person checks their phone daily.
• 26% of car accidents are caused by phone use.
• 33% of people admit to hiding from family and friends to check social media.
• 95% of people use some type of electronics in the hour before bedtime.
• 53% of people wake up at least once in the night to check their phones.

Today, God’s people suffer not only from an information overload but also from spending more time online with virtual friends than time loving God and loving our actual neighbors as ourselves.

This Lent, let me encourage you to consider the spiritual discipline of digital fasting as a meaningful way of growing your faith and redirecting your life:

1. In the morning, go online only after you have taken time with God, and only after you have taken time to decide what you have to do.
2. Work twice a day for one hour offline. Put your phone in airplane mode and disconnect from WiFi.
3. Set aside a half day once or twice a month during which you deliberately disconnect in order to focus on what is important to you spiritually, vocationally, and personally.
4. Check your e-mails only during restricted periods during the day and turn your e-mail inbox off during the rest of the day.
5. In the hour before you go to sleep, read a good book, maybe even the Bible.

Disconnecting from the technology that has lured us into thinking that we cannot live without it will enable us to pause and regain a healthy perspective for real-life experiences and for God, and in the process, we may just find ourselves hungering more for the One in whom we live and move and have our being.