At around 11 am this morning I mentioned to Michael, "Wow, I haven't looked at my iPad once today!". Now that might not seem like a big deal but it is. It's a big deal because for the last few months my iPad was the first thing I reached for in the morning and the last thing I put down at night.
I confess, I was addicted. Not to social media, the usual culprit, but to a game. I'm not even going to mention which game, because the point of this post is not to shame the game. It was the type of game where you are in charge of a town, from the first line of production to filling townspeople's orders, etc.
Seemingly innocent fun, no violence, no need to spend real money, hey, it could even be called educational - after all, Zanté now knows that you get milk from cows, which can then be made into cheese, which is a necessary ingredient of hamburgers, nachos and cheesecake! Also, you have to feed the cows in order for them to produce milk. But you first need to plant and harvest the wheat and grain in order to produce the cow's food. However, you can only have a certain number of fields per townspeople, so you need to keep building houses so that your population increases. You cannot build houses without community buildings, and cannot complete community buildings without filling the train cars with products in return for building materials. Oh and don't forget to send gifts to your friends and then check their towns and help them also fill orders and train cars and airplane crates...
Quietly, insidiously, this game became a larger and larger part of my life. When the girls were playing nicely I would just check and see whether there were any orders I could fill. When they were taking their nap I would first get a production line of products going before starting on real tasks, and then wonder why I didn't have enough time to get things done! When we were driving I would consider it the ideal time to catch up on what was happening in my town, and would stay up late trying to fill every crate on the airplane.
There were other consequences to this addiction. Zanté and Lexi would spot me playing on the iPad and then insist on doing the same. This upped their screentime from an hour a day to many more. Michael and I found less time to talk. My head hurt from looking at a screen so much. Worst of all, on my bedside table, my Bible lay untouched underneath my iPad.
I had deleted the game several times before, only to re-install it less than 24 hours later. (Can't let that daily bonus slide, right?) I just couldn't resist that feeling of accomplishment when I got all those trains filled, or managed to fill enough orders to afford the next factory, or filled the airplane so quickly that I got a major "experience point" bonus, or, best of all, leveled up! This is why these games are so popular, and they are designed to keep you playing. www.video-game-addiction.org has some informative articles with regards to this.
However, the grace of our Heavenly Father is such that He will not allow His child to remain naive to the dangers of her actions for long, and He provided me with a very clear message through Llewellyn's message on Sunday, titled "What is your daily bread?". Even though I was in the mother's room and did not hear the entire message I remember him saying, "what is the first thing you think of in the morning? The last thing you think of at night?" Well, I knew what that was, and I felt ashamed. I knew what needed to be done. I deleted the game. This time, I won't be going back.
Today, my first day free of the game, was a very productive day! Today was the first day in weeks that I didn't have a headache. Not once was I busy reading to my daughter while wondering whether a train had returned with those oh so important building materials. Neither Zanté nor Lexi touched an iPad or even asked for one. We played, we painted, we visited with family. I literally felt free!
The world has so many ways in which it seeks to capture our attention. Many of these things don't seem terrible, at first, and yet they have the potential to do so much damage. I hope that this experience will help me to more accurately assess the dangers of an activity in future, or at least help me to recognize that I have been "trapped" sooner, and I pray that by my sharing this experience I may help my fellow believers also free themselves of such things, so as to have that much more time for the really important things, which for me are my family, and my God.
