You spent 600 fewer hours with people outside your household in the last two years than you used to.
That’s the finding of the Labor Department’s annual “American Time Use Survey.” Every year thousands of people are asked to track every minute of a single day. In 2020 and 2021, the survey revealed that the time we spent with people outside the household dropped by a full hour each day.
And what did we do with the time we used to spend with others outside the home? Mostly we just browsed online.
In their book, Veneer, Timothy Willard and Jason Locy wrote:
From our couch, we fade into the invisible, people devoid of tangible interaction, our real actions glossed over with pithier status updates, our pictures self-curated, our wall-posts filled with trite comments….We’ve fallen asleep in the land of handshakes and eye contact and walks on the beach and awakened in a world where humans look like products in an online shopping cart—downloadable, browse-able, clickable, even deleteable.... At the end of the day, we can close our relationships as we close our laptops, untouched and unmoved by the lives of others. (Emphasis added).
Does that describe you?
For decades, we’ve tested for a person’s IQ—their “Intelligence Quotient.” It’s a measurement of a person’s reasoning ability. More recently, researchers have discovered that an even more important appraisal is one’s EQ—their “Emotional Quotient.” If our Intelligence Quotient measures how well we think, our Emotional Quotient measures how resilient we are to change and stress. It’s important to measure these capacities, but I think it’s time we assessed another area: Our Friendship Quotient. We need to measure how well we relate to others.
Jesus gave us a way to do this. We’ll study his words in John 15:9-17 as we continue our series through John’s Gospel this Sunday. We’ve designated this Sunday as “Friend Day.” Forward this enewsletter to friends and invite them to come with you. You can also forward it as a reminder to friends you’ve already invited. See you at 10am!
--Tom
Tom Goodman serves as pastor at Hillcrest Church in Austin, Texas. His sermons are available on YouTube and the HillcrestToGo Podcast and you can find him on Facebook and Twitter. If someone forwarded this email newsletter to you, sign up here to receive Tom’s weekly devotional in your email inbox.