A few days ago, Ugandans crawled out of the dungeon after a 4-day nationwide internet blackout.

Photo by Kayla Farmer on Unsplash

You’d be excused if you said some popped out with fresher eyeballs and rusting thumbs. We were basically returned to normal settings—I’m talking about radio stations and face-to-face conversations. I suspect, too, thanks to our suddenly boring gadgets, several toddlers in many living rooms were carried on laps more times in recent weeks than before.

Some Ugandans, if not most, came out seething at the “electoral injustices” (I hesitate to digress) that accompanied the most-felt injustice of digital deprivation.

Afterwards, a few in my circles still called the shutdown a surprising “wonderful detox” they did not ask for but were glad they experienced. Why?

I understood them, seeing my phone “grew unpleasant” too as I experienced some rare unexpected downtime with my daughter. As we enjoyed co-listening to a (pre-downloaded) profile about Uganda’s nature together, we’d not done something together like that for long!

In fact, my brain felt more “airy” too throughout the “season” until I couldn’t help soothing my “withdrawal symptoms” with some endless radio (CBS FM rescued the day)

The entire “internet-less” experience felt like “I was made to live like this! ”

A few hours later, it also hit me that not everyone felt like some among us did—that a lack of constant WiFi was a moral win, even if temporary, to remind us that sometimes a life with no Instagram reels is what launches repairs for the soul.

Sure, some, understandably so, endured traveling abroad in order to keep working online, but many like me suddenly had the reality hit hard that life is more than “continually broadcasting and being broadcast to.”

As a parent, I know well the battle between my phone attention and kids, so what the government directive indirectly got me “suppressed” into was focused parenting and confronting my offline humanity. God works in mysterious ways! Doesn’t he?

He has made us for human connection, and the internet’s promise of connection always underdelivers. We are sub-creators made to live and experience reality, not only consume it inside our heads.

What tech deprivation (temporary or not, received under duress or not) reminds us is that there is a wonderful world out there whose tall grass our toes have never touched, a world we miss every time we bend our neck to catch the next notification. A glorious world where adult hands lift toddlers by their armpits and turn them around in the air for hours, without any “leftover thoughts” from an Instagram post or TikTok video still eating away at half of Mummy’s mind.

It’s a rare world lately where your family people dance near the couch or cake without you, their host, distracting yourself with camera settings and poses instead of enjoying the moment.

It’s the beautiful in-person world we find at church the Sunday after the blackout, looking in the dark part of each other’s eye and really asking, “How are you?” because we weren’t consumed in viewing each other’s status all week anyway!

This is the first-century world that embraced Jesus, God in flesh, not as an MP4 file, a world from which the writer of Hebrews urges us to keep carrying our bodies into fellowship every week, not giving up the habit of meeting together (rather than only login or livestream)

It also hit me during that season that we shouldn’t assume that kind of analog-like world is known or obvious to everyone today. For many on this side of heaven, the little utopia that Mark Zuckerberg offers through his Meta products is all they will ever experience as bliss. Natural man may never comprehend what socializing is, without logging in.

Woah! We went moaning after just 4 days without certain rechargeable screen lights, yet the writer of Revelation says in eternity, the (entire) sun shall cease to shine and the glory of God shall be our light!

God’s “status” is what is (and will be) worth viewing for a billion years, long after we take our last breath, offline. How about we start practicing now?

Can we still be human if our headphones never come off? Does propitiation still make sense for the always-plugged-in? Many felt an internet recess was meant for bad, but what if God turned it for good? reminding us of what we were made for?