I Will Never Keep Up With Any Of It

You are tired of it, and I do not think you have said that plainly.

Something changes and there is a new thing to learn. You learn enough of it to get by. And then that changes, or a different one arrives, and there is another. And underneath all of it is the sense that you are always slightly behind and always will be, and that the gap is widening rather than closing.

That is exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with any particular device. It is the exhaustion of a race with no finish, that you did not enter, and that you are apparently losing.

So I want to say the thing this whole site has been walking toward, and I want it to be the last thing you read here.

You do not have to keep up.

Not as encouragement. As a fact. There is no obligation anywhere, from God or from anybody else, that you remain current with any of this. Keeping up is not a duty. It is not a mark of a functioning adult. It is not something you will be asked about.

You need a few things to work. That is the whole of what is actually required of you, and it is a much smaller ask than the one you have been carrying.

One thing is needful

There is a moment in a house where one sister is doing everything and the other is doing nothing, and the sentence that lands is not the one anybody expects.

But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her. (Luke 10:42, King James Version)

One thing is needful.

Martha is not being told off for working. Look at what is actually said. She is described as careful and troubled about many things, and the correction is not that she should care less. It is that many is the wrong number.

One thing is needful. Not all of them. Not most of them. Not the ones that arrived this year.

And then: which shall not be taken away from her. What is chosen well is secure. It does not need to be defended each year against the next thing, and it does not expire when something new comes out.

I am not going to strain that verse into being about your phone, and it is not about your phone. It is about a person exhausted by many things being told that the number itself is the problem, and that choosing a small number well is not a lesser way to live.

You are able to choose a small number and have it be enough, and many has never once been the required number. Luke 10:42 names one thing as needful and calls a well chosen part secure, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a relief rather than a rebuke.

What you actually need

Here is the practical work and it is the last thing this site asks of you.

You do not need a phone. You need it to do about three things.

Perhaps it is: speak to my daughter, see the photographs of the grandchildren, and check the bank. Perhaps it is messages, the bus times, and the radio. Everybody's three are different and nobody else's are relevant.

And the thing about your three is that they do not change much. The devices change constantly, and what people actually need has been almost identical for twenty years. You are not falling behind on your three. Your three have been the same the whole time.

Everything else that has ever been announced is not something you failed to keep up with. It was never on your list. It belonged to somebody else's three, and there was never a moment where it became yours.

You have three things and they have not changed, and everything else has never once been a thing you fell behind on. The written word calls many the wrong number and one the needful one, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person stop competing in a race that was never theirs.

Write down the three

So here is the last assignment on this site.

Write down the three things you actually need a device to do.

Three. Not five and not a list of everything you can imagine wanting. Three things that matter to your actual life, in your own words, not the words the shop would use.

Then look at the list, because there are two things in it that you may not have seen.

The first is that you can already do most of them. Probably all three. You have been feeling behind while doing the entire thing that was ever required of you.

The second is that the list is short enough to be finished. Not a race. A list, with an end on it, and you are at or near the end of it already.

Luke 10:42 says one thing is needful and calls the chosen part secure, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a person writes down what they actually need and finds it is a short list.

You are able to name your three and be done, and it has never once been a smaller life to want a small number of things. Luke 10:42 puts the needful at one rather than many, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody at a table writing three lines.