Trevin Wax, in This Is Our Time, relates how Andy Crouch, former senior editor at Christianity Today, recently spent several weeks away from all screens. Not just the phone, but the laptop, tablet, email, and TV—all the digital companions on our journey through life. He kept his phone for the ability to message family and friends, but "compared to my normal life, " he says, "in which a rectangle is glowing in front of me seven to nine hours a day, it was a dramatic and initially disorienting change."

You might expect Andy's description of this time away from screens to focus on what he missed about all the things he gave up. Instead, Andy's recollections are about everything he gained during that season. He worked on his piano skills for the first time in twenty years. He exercised more and read great books. He finished some projects around the house. But the biggest blessing of this season was "a small measure of attention," which Andy describes this way: "an ability to calm the noise enough to read and cry over a story, or to listen with a friend to one short passage of Scripture read over and over, four times with long silences in between. And the prerequisite for that kind of attention—though I would not want to exaggerate how much I managed to attain it—was a sense of my own smallness."