Phone Down. Heart Ready, with Lara d’Entremont

Would you be willing to admit that one of the greatest barriers to meaningful time in God’s Word is . . . your phone? In this episode of Grounded, you’ll be challenged to consider how scrolling on your phone may be costing you a spacious place. Find out what this means in this convicting summer episode with guest Lara d’Entremont.

Original Episode: 

How Less Scrolling Could Change Your Life, with Lara d’Entremont

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQAMQh4rYBY

Website: https://www.reviveourhearts.com/podcast/grounded/how-less-scrolling-could-change-your-life-with-lar/

Connect with Lara

Instagram: @lara_dentremont
Twitter: @lara_dentremont
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/laradentremont
Website: https://www.laradentremont.com/

Episode Notes

• A Place of Quiet Rest book by Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.
• “Overcoming Anxiety” episode of Revive Our Hearts Weekend.
• “The Pursuit of Quiet” blog post by Heidi Jo Fulk.

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Lara d'Entremont: In order to memorize Scripture, in order to pray, we need that quiet time. Our brains can only hold so many items in our immediate memory, and then it needs to travel into our longer-term memory. There are times when I've started my day with my phone, and I can tell the difference. Not only was it making it difficult for me to hold all the information I needed in a day, I also didn't have room for Scripture. I didn't have room for prayer. All the times I wondered, How on earth can I pray without ceasing? I was listening to content without ceasing.

Portia Collins: What if getting your heart ready to dig into God's Word doesn't require you to do more, but to do less—less mindless scrolling on your phone? I'm Portia Collins, and this is Grounded, a podcast where we love to hand out hope and perspective.

We're in the middle of a summer series we're calling muscle up your fall Bible study. I hope you have a plan to dig into God's Word with other women this fall. We want to help you get ready. For me, and I'm guessing it's the same for you, one of the greatest barriers to meaningful time in the Word of God is my phone. That's why we're re airing this episode with Lara d'Entremont. She says less scrolling can change your life. I really believe that.

Also in this episode, my favorite girl, Erin Davis, will ask you to consider the cost of scrolling so much. She says our phones are costing us a spacious place, and I want you to stay put so you can find out exactly what she means in this convicting episode of Grounded.

Lara d'Entremontis a wife, a homeschool mom, and a blogger. She's also a great storyteller. Hello, Lara. Thanks for joining us today.  

11:25 - Grounded with God's People (with Lara d’Entremont) 

Lara: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. 

Dannah Gresh: Lara, I feel your pain that I just mispronounced your name because my name Dannah gets pronounced Dana, Donna. Deanna. So, when I mispronounce a name, I own up to it. Lara, I've been practicing all morning, and I still mess it up. I'm sorry, my friend. 

Lara: No worries.

Dannah: Hey, I’ve got a question for you. Where is your phone?

Lara: It is turned off on my desk right now.

Dannah: Good for you. Well, I want to hear the story of how you came to ask, “Where is your phone right now?”

Lara: So, I noticed I was going through a season of just so much exhaustion. It felt like my head was constantly buzzing and turning. I felt so flustered all the time. I didn't understand what was going on. 

And of course, being a mom to three little ones, my immediate thought was, Oh, my family is just so needy. I'm exhausted all the time. But as I began to read more on phone use, and I was reading books about that. There's a lot of talk about that online right now. I started to question, what if it's not my family? What if it's not that my family is yelling at me all the time? But it's that my phone is yelling at me all the time? 

Dannah: Notifications. 

Lara: Yeah, exactly. Notifications always going off. I was checking emails all the time, checking Facebook messages, checking Instagram, scrolling Instagram, you know, trying to keep up in every single way possible.

Not only that, whenever I had a quiet moment, I had something in my ears. I was listening to something all the time, whether it's audiobook, podcast, whatever I could, because I felt like this is the best use of my time, right? I mean, I'm just making some grilled cheeses. I should be listening to something right now multitasking, get as much done as possible. 

Dannah: Yeah.

Lara: But what I didn't realize was how it was truly affecting me. I was so much more grumpy. I was tired. I wasn't sleeping. All my ideas as a writer felt like they had simply just fallen out of my head and dissolved. I didn't understand why. 

And the reason why is because I was constantly filling my head with content, constantly scrolling, and I thought, shouldn't that have the reverse effect? Shouldn't I be more filled with ideas because I'm listening to so much content? 

A friend of mine studies memory a lot. And she was telling me that our brains can only hold like five items at a time. And my phone is bringing in way more than five items at a time. 

And so, I realized, the reason why I had no space in my brain is because my brain was constantly scrambling to try to find what was important in all this information I was taking in. Which pieces to hold on to were most vital? Was it that message that just popped in with a meme? Was it this article, I had just read about technology? What was it? And so my brain simply couldn't handle it. 

I was beginning to wonder, is this just something that's trending right now online? Or is this something actually biblical? And so, as I began to look at Scripture, and I began to look at older theologians who didn't have phones and didn't have all this technology. I looked at Spurgeon and his recommendation for people who are depressed and anxious and exhausted, was to get alone, have some quiet—like, literal, quiet time of simply being silent. 

Dannah: So, this was a problem before our phones, is what you’re saying. 

Lara: Exactly. Matthew Henry talked about it when commenting on Jesus' passage where He would go off by Himself. He likewise said, we need this, and that Jesus even called His disciples to this. And so, I began to see the Psalms: “be still” “be quiet.” I saw Jesus going off to be still and be quiet. And I saw this isn't just, a trending issue right now. It is a real true spiritual issue as well.

Because not only was it making it difficult for me to hold all the information. I needed in a day. I also didn't have room for Scripture. I didn't have room for prayer all the times. I wondered, how on earth can I pray without ceasing? I was listening to content without ceasing.

Dannah: Yeah. Oh, that's so good. Listening to content without ceasing. Yes. And so much of that content is mindless, useless, little trivial bits of information, not stuff we really need to know. Headline news. You know what we used to get our news at six o'clock every night, and it did us good for 24 hours. 

What I have found is that it doesn't really change every hour. The headlines don't change hour by hour; they change day by day. And yet, we're still fixated on the news scroll, hour by hour, minute by minute.

You know, you mentioned that the Spurgeon addressed it, the Bible addressed that, Jesus addressed it, the need for this quiet. So, if we go to God's Word, do we find that the Bible addresses our need for quiet, and does that help us connect to God in a powerful way? What did your studies find?

Lara: I found that it's important for us to be quiet because I mean, how are we going to memorize Scripture, if we don't have that time for our brain to simply meditate on that item? Like I said, our brains can only hold so many items in our immediate memory, and then it needs to travel into our longer-term memory. 

In order to do that, you know, in order to memorize Scripture, we need that quiet. We need that quiet time in order to pray. We actually aren't able to multitask as much as we'd like to believe it. 

And so, in order to be praying, we need to be quiet. 

And so, things like when I'm flipping the grilled cheeses, when I'm stirring the soup, I'm realizing I don't need to be listening to something right now. Instead, I can take this moment and pray for the friend who texted me last night and said, I need prayer for this. I can pray for her in that moment. Or I can take the Bible passage I was reading that morning from Exodus and dwell on it and think on it. 

Dannah: Yes. 

Lara: You know, for all the times that I talked about, it's so hard to find time to meditate on Scripture. It's so hard to continue to remember to pray for all these people. I was remembering to scroll; I was remembering to listen to the latest podcast episode, right? So Scripture was calling me to that. I needed to recognize I was the one making the excuses.

Dannah: I read an article recently. It was in Time Magazine about how our phones have created a fight or flight response in us. And this is kind of how it works. There's a part of the brain. It's a pea-sized part of the brain that scans the horizon. If there's any kind of change in the in the horizon, or the room that you're in, or the space that you're in, that little piece is part of the brain, its only job is to ping the amygdala and say that you need to make sure this isn't a threat. 

So, all it’s looking for is change. So, 100 years ago, those changes would come few and far between. Now, because of our phones and notifications, our phones are picking up on the notification, little red notification button, and pinging the amygdala. And essentially, this is keeping us in a low-level state of fight or flight at all times. 

But when you're in fight or flight, a lot of other parts of your brain shut down. So, the memory storage part, the meditation part, the peaceful part, the part that creates a general sense of wellness, all those things shut down, because they're ready to run if they need to, just in case. 

And so, that really did something to me. I was like, oh no, that is happening to me. And that's why my brain keeps checking the phone, because I feel that little buzz in my pocket, or I happen to notice that little red dot, and I want to check it. It's almost like it is inviting me not to be present, not to meditate, not to be grateful. 

You know, instead of stirring the mashed potatoes on Thursday for Thanksgiving and being grateful for all the people that are coming over, I'm going to be checking that ping notification. And that's not how God created me to live, I am completely convinced. He created me to live in peace. 

But you brought the word up “excuses.” I want to talk about that for just a minute. My husband and I met a very successful man this week. He has a really incredible business. He’s a Christian businessman. And somehow the topic of phones came up, and he said, “I have a flip phone.” Our jaws just dropped. We just went, “People still use those?” We got in the car. My husband said, “Well, he's probably successful enough that he has people with smartphones that are checking everything for him immediately.” We had an excuse. I do think that's what we run to. 

So, what would you say to the woman who says that sounds wonderful? I want to be more present. I want to be more connected to God, I want to be still before him. But I have three teenagers. They're always in different places. Or, I want to do that, but I'm a businesswoman. It wouldn't be practical. What would you say to those excuses?

Lara: I'd say that I feel that because I do have a husband who works out of the house, he needs to get in contact with me. I have a son who has a tracking device because he runs, and so I need my phone to be able to know where he is if he does flee. And so, I definitely get that. 

And so, my thought is that our phones, interestingly enough, have started to come up with ways of limiting the sounds I don't need Instagram to keep my children safe. 

Dannah: You don’t?

Lara: No, it’s interesting. I can delete Instagram off my phone. I can delete Facebook. I can silence the messages that I don't need to be getting. I have I have an iPhone. So, I'm able to say these are the only people who can break through that notification barrier that I have set up. 

And so, you can tell your phone, “Be quiet except for on these occasions.” And so, I think that can really help us to relieve that anxiety of, “Oh, but what if I get this important phone call because we have therapies with our kids and I'm waiting for those important phone calls.” And so, I have set up that those ones will come through, but the other ones they can wait.

Part of it is trusting God right to remember that I can put my phone away. And you want these people who can get a hold of me. All the others can go to voicemail, and it can be dealt with later, because I am not eternal. That was the big thing for me to remember, that I'm not eternal, omnipresent. I can't be because I want to be. 

Dannah: Finite women. 

Lara: Right. I wanted to be able to be there for everybody at every single moment. And I had to realize I can't be, and that's okay. That's actually the way God made me.

Dannah: You know, we have a friend, Gretchen Saffles that Well-Watered Women. I think it's singular, Well-Watered Woman. I'm sorry Gretchen if I got that wrong. She says, “Throne before phone.” And she says if you start your day in the Word rather than on your screen, it is a trajectory change for the rest of the day. What would you say to that thought and that idea?

Lara: Yeah, I completely agree. Because even though I wrote this article, I still struggle with this issue; I still do. There are times when I've started my day with my phone. I can tell the difference when I've sat down. You know, I wake up before the kids, and I've sat down with my breakfast and just sat quietly reading the Bible and praying. I can tell the difference in my day. 

Because rather than starting the day with all those notifications, all those emails, realizing, oh my goodness, look at how big my to-do list is already this early in the morning before the sun is up. 

It's just a different way to start: knowing, laying everything before Jesus before I've even seen all the notifications and being able to say, “Help me today. I am not infinite.”

Dannah: That's right. God took care of all those notifications while you're asleep. Now that you're awake, He can handle a half hour an hour while you spend a little time in the Word sipping your coffee. He can handle that. 

Erin Davis is just about to take us to God's Word so that we can study this topic just a little bit more deeply. But before we do, how about we do head to the throne and look away from our phones. (Just a bit ironically; you might be watching me on your phone. Don't turn away just yet.) But let's go to the throne of God together. 

Lara, would you just lift us up to the Lord just briefly asking Him to quiet our hearts that we might focus on the Word? 

Lara: For sure.

Dear Father, thank You so much for this day. Thank You, God, that You don’t expect us to be infinite. You don't expect us to be You. But instead, You call us to trust You with what we can't control with what we cannot do. And God, I pray You’d help us to quiet ourselves, to be able to resist the urge to always be on our phones. But instead, to trust You with the notifications. We cannot get to those emails we cannot answer right away. And we would trust You with all we leave unanswered and untended, knowing that You call us to rest and primarily rest in the gospel, that You have done all the work. And we pray this in Your holy name, amen.

Dannah: Amen. Lara d’Entremont Thanks for being with us today on Grounded.

Lara: No worries, thank you so much. 

Dannah: Ladies, we will put a link to Lara's wonderful blog about stepping away from your phone and into the presence of the Lord in the comments. God bless you. And here is the one, the only, Erin Davis to get us grounded in God's Word.

Erin Davis: What an amazing interview. Probably all of our women watching and listening are under conviction. 

Dannah: Yes. 

26:03 - Grounded in God's Word (with Erin Davis)

Erin: We're going to press into that. So, grab your Bibles and open them to the book of Psalms. As you're doing that, you actually don't want to rush past that feeling of conviction. You know, the Lord never speaks the language of shame. And He doesn't call us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps either, because we're weak and He is strong. 

But He does convict us for our good. I always like the example of a splinter. My little boys will get splinters in their fingers, in their hands, and it'll begin to fester, and their daddy will have to take it out. And of course, in the moment that's painful and a little bit scary. But their daddy isn't removing that splinter to cause them harm but that they might be saved from the sickness of having an infection in their bodies. 

And thus is the conviction of the Holy Spirit. He's not convicting us about our phones to squash us. He's not calling us to step away from the constancy of our world to shame us, but because He loves us.

And so, if you're under that conviction, stay under it. Let the Lord show you what His action for you to take is. 

That's a good segue for us to head into what I wanted to talk about this morning. I'll start with this question: “What is the constant scrolling really costing you?”

Now, I know that we could list some of the benefits, and some of them are real. People always get defensive about social media. It kind of cracks me up. Like, “I only use it to contact missionaries in Africa.” It's like, “No, you don't.” We're doing a lot of scrolling. We should ask each other because we love each other. What is that really costing us? 

I think I know one of the answers, it's probably a multifaceted answer. But one of the answers is: it is costing us “a spacious place.” It was in the fallout of a failed adoption that I first found these three words in my Bible, a spacious place. Actually, Dannah Gresh called me as we knew that foster son was being moved out of our home. The Spirit had just impressed onto her to reach out. She prayed for me that the Lord would lead me into a spacious place. And the Spirit kind of stood at attention in my heart. I didn't know what that was, but it sounded like something I really needed. 

I was heartbroken and defeated. That was not how I wanted that situation to go. My husband and I had given everything we could to come to a different ending, and that boy didn't get adopted into our family. 

And so, in the midst of that sorrow and grief and exhaustion, I turned to the place where I know I can always find hope. I found a spacious place there in the pages of God's Word. It's in more places than this. Actually, if you start looking for it, you'll find it all over the place. But the two places I was specifically drawn to in that season were the Psalms. So Psalm 18:19 says this, “He brought me out to a spacious place; he rescued me, because he delighted in me.” 

So you can imagine, in the vortex of pain and sorrow, this thought that God wanted to rescue me because He's still delighted in me. He wasn't disappointed in me. There was a place, a spacious place that He could take me to. I really latched on to that and held on for dear life. 

And then continuing to read through the Psalms, I came to Psalm 31:8 the Lord there, “He has not handed me over to the enemy. And you have set my feet in a spacious place.” 

So, I want you to imagine that you're walking through thick, dark woods this morning. There are thorns tearing at your pants, and your feet have blisters. You're so tired, and you're a little afraid. And suddenly, you come to a clearing. A circle of trees with a grassy patch in the middle, where the sunlight streams in and soft moss at your feet invites you to lay down and rest a while.

This is what I picture when I think of a spacious place. 

And as I grieved the adoption gone wrong, the Lord did lead me into a spacious place, a place where my body and my mind could rest for a while, not forever. Eventually, you have to exit the forest, which means going back through the trees and the brambles, but there are times when in the midst of suffering or grief or sorrow or sickness or exhaustion, God wants to lead you into a spacious place. Remember what we just read. He rescues us. He leads us into a spacious place because He delights in us. 

And when the enemy is gunning for us, he refuses to hand us over because we belong to Him, the King of kings. He sets our feet, our lives, in a spacious place—a place where there's a break in the action, a place where we can rest in Him. 

Doesn’t this remind you of Psalm 23, that beloved psalm about how our Shepherd leads us? Listen to verses one and two. “The Lord is my shepherd. I have what I want. He lets me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.” It sounds like a spacious place to me. 

And why does God lead us to spacious places? Again, is it because of His delight in us in the midst of the rat race of life, and it can be a grind. He will sometimes give us a spacious place so that we can remember how much He loves us, how much He enjoys us, that we are the very apple of His eye. Then that spacious place can give us fortitude to keep fighting. 

So, I'll ask us again, what is our scrolling costing us? In that time in my life where I first needed to know about a spacious place, I had a flip phone, the kind Dannah was talking about. There was no social media on it. Text still took like hitting the same button multiple times to get the right letter. You remember, that wasn't that long ago? 

And so, as the Lord led me into a spacious place, there were other things I could distract myself with. But it wasn't the strong pull of my phone that I have now. I want you to know that the algorithm is stronger than you are. The algorithms that have been built into our phones, they have been built based on brain science. They have been built to continue keeping us tethered to our phones. Are we gonna let the algorithm decide how we spend our quiet moments? Or are we going to let the God who wired our brains decide how we spend our quiet moments?

I believe there are going to be moments possibly in each day and certainly in the seasons of your life, where the Lord desires to woo you out of the forest into that grassy circle and help you lay down. Psalm 23 says make you lay down. And you're going to have to disconnect from your phone to get what He has for you. 

If you scroll your way through the spacious place, you will miss the point. If every time there is a break in the action of your day you fill it with distraction, you will miss the opportunity just to simply exhale and be reminded, God loves me. He delights in me. He has not turned me over to the enemy. He has set my feet on a spacious place. 

If as soon as your workload slows down, you fill the space with new projects. And listen, this girl is preaching to the choir. It's not always my phone that fills the spacious place. But if we do that, we miss the clearing that the Lord leads you to in a spacious season. And sometimes His assignment for us is lay down rest. And if you refuse, you won't recognize what has always been true. He has not handed you over to the enemy. He has set your feet in a spacious place. 

So, I'm going to do maybe a Grounded first here. I'm gonna go rogue. I'm gonna have the equivalent of a Grounded altar call. Now, we call it an altar, because in the Old Testament, people would bring their offering to the Lord. They would surrender it to Him as a way of saying, “My life is Yours, Lord.Mmy grain is Yours. My oil is Yours. My animals are Yours. My life is Yours.”

I don't want you to just be here this morning. This isn't new. We all know our phones aren't good for us. We all know that it's causing this fuzzy brain that Lara described. 

So, I'm going to call you to respond. If the Lord has convicted you this morning, if you long for the spacious place. First tell Him, “Lord, I have been filling all of my time with trivial things. I haven't been filling them with the things You've called me to. And maybe You've wanted me to be in a spacious place, and I missed it. I scrolled through the whole thing.” Tell Him, ask Him to help you override this urge that is happening at a neurochemical level to fill every second with scrolling. 

And then tell us that you need a spacious place as a means of accountability. You could drop it right there in the chat. If you're not watching live, you can always add it to the Facebook notes or the YouTube notes, email us. Find a way to get a hold of us and just say, “I need a spacious place and the next time the Lord leads me to one. I don't want to spend it scrolling.” 

So, if you find yourself in a clearing, even in this busiest of weeks, I hope you'll resist the urge to fill it. I hope you will enjoy the spacious places that God gives you. They are given to you as a gift by God who loves you so much. Portia.

Portia: Erin Davis . . .

Erin: You got your shoe on?

Portia: I need a spacious place. That's how I'm gonna say, “I need a spacious place.” Thank you so much for that. Thank you. 

Dannah: Amen. 

Portia: We know there are a lot of Bible studies out there, and choosing one to dig into this fall can be daunting. That's why, before we say goodbye, I want to point you to our summer Bible study sale. These are studies that are going to get you grounded in God's Word, and they are up to half off.

Okay, who loves a sale? Girl, the sale ends later this week, so be sure to visit ReviveOurHearts.com, and click on the Bible study sale link to order your resources today.

Now, our muscle up for fall Bible study series continues next week with a powerful interview from the one and the only Kay Arthur. You don't want to miss it.

Let's wake up with hope together next week on Grounded. Grounded is a listener supported production of Revive Our Hearts, calling women to freedom fullness and fruitfulness in Christ you.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.