We Traded the Soil for Screens

But creation beckons us back.

Personal photo, 2025.

Greetings! I know the gap between posts was a little longer than usual, but all is well! A new role at work shuffled my schedule a bit, and I’ve been enjoying some summer fun with the family too.

This week marks one year since I started this Substack. Lately I’ve wanted to summarize its main themes in a single post, and the anniversary seems like a good excuse to try. So keep an eye out for the upcoming, “What Is the Long Renewal?”

And welcome to all the newcomers! For reasons unknown to me, a bunch of people have subscribed since I last posted. I guess it turns out that the secret to finding new readers is to take a couple weeks off.

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There’s no thrill quite like swinging a broom at bats whizzing by.

Or so my dad tells me.

His early years on a farm in Eastern Washington were the setting for countless adventures. A favorite escapade took place in the barn. It began with climbing hay bales stacked up nearly to the rafters. By this route, a clan of cousins, most with ages still in the single digits, ascended to the upper loft. It was a mysterious world where slumbering bats dangled just overhead. Quietly, the crew placed tarps over any openings to the outside world. Soon every winged escape path was sealed.

Then they turned the lights on. The bats went into a frenzy.

Dad and his co-conspirators were ready with their brooms. The goal, apparently, was to whack a bat so hard it wound up dazed and rolling around on the hay. Then, naturally, you put it in a jar.

But echolocation made the task tricky.

“Harder than you might think to hit one,” Dad says.

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Growing up, I would hear the farm stories on summer evenings at family reunions. One involved trying to smoke a squirrel out of a hole in a tree (not recommended). Another featured Dad at age six or seven climbing unnoticed onto a tractor. He drew some attention as soon as he disengaged the gear and set the machine in motion down a hill. His own father, fittingly, came to the rescue (and nearly lost his leg in the process).

At the family gatherings, you could never predict when Dad and his siblings would start reminiscing. But once they did, it was as if a champagne bottle of memories had been uncorked. Their laughter was deep, and their joy was evident.

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From Soil to Screens

The stories, from the late 1950s and early 1960s, are still within living memory. And apart from a few modern wonders like the tractor, their experiences would have been familiar to children going back countless generations.

What’s happened since? I think of the cartoon trope where a hapless character is sucked up in a tornado, then gets plopped down in an unfamiliar location. We’re all sitting here stunned now, staring out at the modern world, blinking occasionally. It’s no surprise we can’t make sense of it. Until very recently, wisdom collected over millennia remained practical and relevant. But now each generation’s experience is foreign to the last.

When he started elementary school, my dad lived on a farm. At the same age, I put a floppy disc into a computer and played Oregon Trail. Today, my kids would watch John Deere tractor videos on YouTube all day if I let them.

And for most children now, that’s all agriculture is: optional entertainment. Even back in 2019, a study found that kids were logging an average of 150 minutes of screen time per day at age three. Pixel-based amusement didn’t put an end to the family farm, but it did gobble up our attention after its demise. And a vicious cycle is emerging with excessive time on devices fueling emotional problems in young people, who then turn back to screens to cope.

You’d have to go back earlier than the 1950s to find a time when childhood on a farm was the American norm. But it’s still startling how quickly the dirt-under-the-fingernails childhood has vanished. And how it’s been replaced by the gleam of the screen.

What stories will today’s kids have to tell? What will they reminisce about when they’re grown?

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Whether you’re new here or a familiar face, please say hello in the comments. And if you’re inclined to share: What’s a childhood story that you still tell today?

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Pushing Back

Reflecting on so much rapid change poses its own challenges. Some will feel regret or defensiveness. Others may simply shrug and pivot to false choices: You have a rosy view of a farming life you never knew? Leery of technological change? Maybe you should just join the Amish!

Many will agree that a shift is badly needed, but find it hard to sustain. A goal of simply reducing screen time will probably fail—for kids or for any of us. Choosing to not do something is hard, and doubly so when that something draws us back with sound effects and glowing images. A better chance of success will come with aiming for something. We need something positive to aim our attention at. A replacement.

The soil offers a great antidote to digital delirium. Unlike media that offers one instant dopamine hit after another, growing plants is wonderfully slow. And you don’t have to upend your life and buy a farm to experience this. Last winter I built a garden box that’s now bursting with food our family enjoys. The kids love watering and even weeding it.

If I’ve piqued your interest, an internet search for “raised garden bed plans” will turn up plenty of options. You don’t even need much in the way of tools or skills. I put ours together with a cordless drill and a few screws. A store that sells the wood will usually also cut it to length if you ask.

Like the idea but don’t want to build anything? Just use pots. There are options for nearly every skillset and living space. And there are plants for every season (summer isn’t too late to get started).

Cultivating the Mind of Christ

I’m about to turn a corner here. Of course, if you know my writing, you already know I have more on my mind than just fresh tomatoes or a screen-free hobby. As a Christian, I want to fill my mind with God’s Word and orient my life to its rhythms. I want that for our whole family. I want that for you and yours.

A shift back from the screen to the soil, even a small one, helps in this regard. The connection between gardening and the Bible isn’t immediately obvious, so I’ll explain.

Consider. . .did you possibly skim your way to this point in the post? Don’t worry, I don’t take it personally. Almost everyone on a device does that. A 2008 study found that people were only reading about 25% of the words on a webpage. That number is likely much lower today. And the rise of screen reading has transformed the way we read everything, including the Bible.

In turn, even the way we think about Scripture has changed. As we skim, we quickly ask, “What’s my takeaway from this passage?” We’ve trained our brains for efficiency. We want to distill information as quickly as possible and then move on. To put it a tackier way, we approach God’s Word asking, “Where’s a good spiritual life-hack I can use?”

The problem is that Scripture eventually disappoints when you approach it like this. You won’t experience the kind of growth in God that truly satisfies.

Consider that fact as you read Romans 5:1-5:

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.

There’s a cascading quality to this passage, with each idea overflowing into the next. Yes, you could skim it, remind yourself that God loves you, and carry on. But sitting with each powerful statement and contemplating it will yield much more.

Justification. Peace with God. Faith. Grace.

Those four ideas are mentioned in just the first sentence. And each offers a whole universe of scriptural associations to meditate on.

See, to really internalize Scripture we need the mind of a gardener. We need to be patient and observant. We need to understand that the formation of a Christ-like soul is a slow, mysterious process.

Embrace it.

And don’t forget to share the stories you gain along the way.