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The iPhone has this new feature that tracks the amount of screen time one uses. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it is good to know how I am spending my time, but on the other hand, it is very disheartening… to know how much time I’ve wasted.

As I write this, my daily average is 3 hours 14 minutes per day, which is 27% down from my usage last week ~ good job Kevin! That is until you do the math. 27% down, means I was averaging around 4 hours of screen time per day last week, which translates to 28 hours per week and 1,512 hours per year. That’s a lot of time.

After some research, I can safely say that the time I’m spending on the phone is right around the average for a young adult. However, that’s nothing to be proud of! That’s just the phone too. On average we are also spending 2737.5 hours watching TV every year. Add those two mediums together and that’s 4,250 hours!

What else could we do with that amount of time?

If instead of watching an episode of Crash Landing before bed, you opted to read the Bible, you could read through the entire Bible. In six months.

If you spent 400 hours reading per year, reading at an average pace, you could read 200 books. That’s about 4 books per week. I’ve always wanted to finish Lord of the Rings.

The most common complaint I hear from people is that they don’t have enough time. Between work and raising a family, one is hard-pressed to even find time to go to church. But might we benefit from reconsidering how we currently spend our time? Can some of that time be repurposed towards our faith life?

Andrew Sullivan put it best, "the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but a distraction.”

We are becoming increasingly deaf to the voice of God. How are we to pray, or read the scriptures, or quietly journal, when we reach for our phones every chance we get to get that quick dopamine hit of seeing our friends like our IG post?

What would happen to our spiritual lives if we were able to reclaim some of that time lost to phone? I believe our faith lives would be enriched with greater zeal and intimacy than we could ever imagine.

Here's a challenge I invite you to embark on with me: silence your phone for 30 minutes every morning.