The Pull of the Screen or the Promise of the Season?

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There’s a certain kind of glory to spring that makes your breath catch, even on an ordinary Thursday. The tulips are blooming, the robins are nesting, and the air smells like hope. Outside, the world feels young and full of beginnings—graduations, First Communions, Confirmations. Milestones are everywhere, nudging us toward celebration.

But for mothers, this season isn't just for caps and gowns. It’s a commencement of our own. Not the loud, triumphant kind, but the quiet recognition that something is ending—and something else is being invited in. For years, we were in the thick of it—diapers, carpool lines, reheated coffee. Now, we’re still needed, yes—but differently. Or maybe you’re needed across a wide range of ages, stretching yourself so thin you feel as if people can see through you—but not really see you.

The summer is coming; the season will shift. What now?

“Spring isn’t just for commencements in caps and gowns. It’s a season of new beginnings for mothers, too.”

Too often, we try to answer that question by scrolling.

We scroll because we’re tired. We scroll because we’re curious. We scroll because we’re wired to reach for words—those of us who once read cereal boxes just to be reading something. We who once binge-read novels under oak trees and called it bliss now find ourselves reading captions on strangers’ lives while dinner simmers and someone’s soccer kit tumbles in the dryer.

“We who once read cereal boxes and novels under oak trees are still readers at heart—let’s give our minds something worthy.”

But let’s name it: this isn’t reading. It’s reaching. And it rarely satisfies.

Reading has always been our portal—to beauty, to empathy, to the widening of the soul. But we’ve drifted and we’ve replaced sustained focus with scrolling.

It’s still there, waiting. You can read again. Let this be your season to read deeply again.

Make it easy. You’re used to reaching for your phone. Train yourself to reach for your Kindle instead. The best decision I’ve made in a long time was the decision to buy a Kindle and a purse big enough to tuck the Kindle inside. Now it goes everywhere with me. Literally. I became a believer on an international trip where I promised myself to avoid screens on my phone. Standing in line for Customs or waiting to board a plane? Everyone around me was scrolling. I was deep in a Katherine Center novel. Later, back home, sitting in a waiting room? I escaped into Rosamunde Pilcher. This one habit switch has changed so much! No more mindless, shallow interactions. Far more opportunities for deep thought and imagination.

A Kindle in your purse can become your secret weapon against the pull of the screen. A novel instead of a feed. A paragraph instead of a reel. A book can take you places. And the Kindle is so much better for you than your phone in so many ways.

The light on a Kindle is kinder than the light on your phone—literally and figuratively. Kindle screens use E-Ink technology, which mimics the look of real paper and offers a reading experience that’s gentle on the eyes. Instead of the harsh glare of backlit devices, a Kindle uses front lighting, which means the light shines onto the page rather than directly into your eyes. It’s a subtle shift that makes a big difference, especially during long reading sessions or quiet nights in bed.

Phones emit blue light that disrupts your body’s natural sleep rhythms. A Kindle, on the other hand, offers a much softer glow with minimal blue light, making it easier to wind down at the end of the day. It invites you to rest. And unlike your phone, your Kindle won’t interrupt your reading with pings or notifications. There’s nothing to scroll, nothing to swipe—just the quiet companionship of words on a page.

Reading outdoors? A Kindle shines here, too—its glare-free screen is easy to see even in direct sunlight. And the battery? It lasts for weeks, not hours, so you never have to stop mid-chapter to hunt for a charger. All of these little differences add up to something meaningful: a space where reading becomes restful again. The Kindle doesn’t just light a screen—it lights the way back to deep, focused attention and the joy of getting lost in a good book.

“A Kindle in your purse can become your secret weapon against the pull of the screen.”

Choosing to read books instead of scrolling social media can be a powerful act of self-care, attention management, and soul formation. This spring, as we head into a summer full of choices, consider this an invitation (or a challenge if that’s more inspiring) to reclaim your attention and your imagination. Here are some reasons to ponder and to remind yourself of when you’re tempted to scroll.

1. Deep Focus vs. Fragmented Attention

Books encourage immersion. They invite your mind to slow down, settle in, and think deeply.
Social media, by design, keeps your attention jumping—training your brain to crave quick hits instead of depth.

2. Mental Health Boost

Reading reduces stress and anxiety. It offers restful escape and quiet moments to breathe.
In contrast, endless scrolling can heighten anxiety, feed comparison, and leave you feeling drained.

3. Rich Vocabulary & Imagination

Books—especially good ones—fill your mind with new words, ideas, and images.
They build imagination. Social media often shrinks language to headlines, emojis, and sound bites.

4. Nourishment for the Interior Life

Books shape your interior world. They feed empathy, patience, and understanding.
Scrolling tends to inflame reactivity, replacing contemplation with quick judgment.

5. Better Sleep & True Rest

Reading before bed calms the mind and helps your body transition to rest.
Screens and social feeds often do the opposite—stimulating the brain and disturbing sleep patterns.

6. Agency & Identity

Choosing a book is an intentional act of formation.
Scrolling is usually reactive—what you see is chosen by algorithms, not by you.

7. Formation, Not Just Information

Books don’t just inform—they transform.
They stay with you, echoing in your thoughts long after the last page.
Social media, on the other hand, often overwhelms with quantity rather than meaning.


“Don’t just scroll through someone else’s life—create your own vision and step into it.”

What to Read This Spring (Instead of Scrolling)

Literary Fiction That Feeds the Soul

Gentle Reads for Waiting Rooms or Tired Days or Long Summer Walks

Biographies of Women Who Lived Beautiful Lives

Non-Fiction for Curiosity and Contemplation

We all have books that mark a turning point or a milestone in our lives, books that have shaped us or been pivotal in some important way. What are yours? Can you share them in the comments and help us find them, too?

Psst: Want to Go Deeper?

If this resonates, come join the conversation in our Take Up & Read membership community. We’re reimagining what it means to grow in wisdom, creativity, and connection. and we talk about books quite a lot. There’s more for you here—quiet joy, deep thought, and good company. so much better than scrolling.

In the Pause: Come take a walk with me

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Last week, I posted some thoughts to my Instagram stories that I want to capture here—and I want to expand on those as well.

There are people who thrive on social interaction, on crowds, on constant information and stimulation. I thrive in the quiet. I thrive out-of-doors. I thrive when I am in motion—but gentle motion, like a brisk walk with lots of permission to stop and take photos or smell lilacs. When Beautycounter shut down, we all listened to the same message. Some people heard a call to action. I heard only the word “pause.” In hindsight, I should have just sat with my word—the word that most stood out to me. I should have listened to the word.

Instead, I tried fix everything all at once. I saw a need. What will people do? How can I serve the people I’ve loved these last three years and find something else that encourages self-care so well? How can I replace lost income? I heard so many messages, read so much information, received and opened and examined the contents of so many boxes! It was all happening so fast—so many moving pieces and people. But I wanted time: time to thoughtfully order products, time to receive them, time to test them and to see how they fared over time. I could not keep up.

And here, despite listening so very carefully to so many people in the “health space,” despite being so determined to find only the cleanest of clean products from household cleaners to skin care to nutritionals, I found myself early Tuesday morning staring at a smoothie made of the stuff of anaphylaxis. Thoroughly tired and still hurrying, I had made it for myself from products sent to me by a new company. I perused the labels as I prepared to sip. Every single packet—every flavor—has banana powder in it. When I was 10, I ate a banana and ended up in the ER becoming acquainted with epinephrine shots. How did I miss the banana? Even though it seems objectively good, this product line is not for me. I am limited by my allergy, something outside my control. Today, I am grateful for the Gift of Limitations (both the book and my actual limitations). I’m grateful to have hit a wall, to be hemmed in, to be able to choose to embrace the pause however uncomfortable it may be at first.

There has been such a fruitful conversation lately about what phone use and social media is doing to our kids. That generation doesn’t have a monopoly on anxiety. The barrage of information and the “crowds” are overwhelming. Grown-up brains are not immune. They can grow and change, too. Neuroplasticity is not just for the young. My brain is tired. My children are watching. For a long time now, I have felt like I cannot keep up with the speed of social media. I was feeling overwhelmed all the time, completely sucked dry of any creativity or ease. And the whole Beautycounter plight accelerated everything to a speed that made me physically ill.

The fences went up. Whether I wanted to keep trying to keep up or not, I could not. Body, mind, and soul—all three begged me to please hear and heed the call to pause.

Like every other person who posts anything to the internet, I only expose a fraction of my life. This is not nefarious. It is only what is possible. No one can reveal her whole self, and some of us have learned just how much is good. We likely learned it the hard way. My life is full of challenges that limit my time to write, my time to research, my time to market, my time to create. And more often than I would care to admit, these challenges have frustrated me to tears. What could I be or do if only I were not limited by the realities of the impediments to my larger-than-possible imagination? This whole Beautycounter crisis? It amplified for me the incessant noise already creating a dissonant cacophony in my head. I had no choice but to see that there was indeed a hedge around me, separating what was truly possible for me and grandiose ideas that were not. I cannot keep pace with the social life of the internet and remain healthy.

And yet.

Writing (and sharing what I write with safe people) is one of

the most life-giving things I can do.

I know this about myself.

As I walked in the early morning, I tried to puzzle this all out: how to hold on to the good, the true, and the beautiful here inside my fenceline? How to inhale deeply and also exhale completely? How to be authentic and life-giving and healthy and whole? How to practice self-care that cannot be packaged in a pretty pink jar or foil lined bag? How to fully lean in to who I was created to be, at peace with all the other iterations not available to me?

Can I do that? In a world full of opportunity, where information is so easily accessible, can I limit myself because it’s in the limits that I will truly flourish? What does that look like? If that is genuine care for myself, how do I open that bottle?

I intend to find out.

I sat to put this post together and I scrolled through my camera roll, looking at the images I’d taken on my many sunrise walks in the last week. I live in an extraordinary neighborhood. Around every corner in the early spring mornings, the air smells like lilacs and the landscape is one breathtaking shot after another. Perusing photos with this post in mind, I noticed something: nearly every picture had a fence in it. Some were picket fences. Some were iron fences. Some were old stone walls. In every picture, the fences added dimension and interest and beauty. The fences were beautiful!

Could I look at fences differently, henceforth? Could I see them not as objects of restraint or prohibition or restriction, but as the beautiful boundary inside which to bloom? Could the fence be beautiful and the space inside the fence also be beautiful? There is ample room here inside the fenceline. There is a lot of good here. Let’s see what will grow.

About something that Viktor Frankl wrote, Stephen Covey said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

We have to pause in order to take up that space between stimulus and response. We have to be in the space for a bit. If we don’t—if we just keep responding without pausing—we relinquish our freedom and our ability to truly grow.

The word is pause.

I hear it now.

I’m listening.

Looking for conversation in real time with real people—face-to-face? We deeply ponder things here—things to make us happier, healthier, holier.

What to Give Up

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A few days before Lent began, my friend Helen posted a quote that struck and stuck as I was pondering the whole “what to do, what to give up” question. On a stark black background, with no pretty picture or accompanying caption, I read, “Hold loosely to the things of this life so that if God requires them of you, it will be easy to let them go.”

Helen’s life is a testimony to this idea. Several years ago, she and her husband and their big bunch of kids moved from a comfortable home near extended family in upstate New York to rural Florida. There, they began homesteading and built a small farm. They also welcomed more children, including one they adopted out of foster care. By all accounts and appearances, they were living a life committed to faith, family and fellowship with their neighbors.

Then, it all shifted dramatically.

Helen and her husband announced that they were selling the farm and moving to a third-world country to spread the Gospel. I can’t tell you where they went because I don’t know. Helen can’t tell me because they are in mortal danger there. Helen is not even her real name. To be a Christian where they are is punishable by death.

I am ashamed to admit that I watched their plans unfold with not a little doubt. I saw them sell or give away everything that wouldn’t fit in one suitcase per family member. All the farm animals, the furnishings, the house and the land itself. Then came the real sticking point for me.

They said goodbye to her elderly father, not knowing if he’d still be alive when they return. They said goodbye to their adult children. They said a tender goodbye to a newly married son, his wife, and their first grandchild due to be born when they are so very far away.

I thought about how much I’ve whined because my kids are scattered across the country. I thought about a house I miss even as I love the one I’m in. I thought about how I am still so dismayed at the complete absence of adoration chapels in Connecticut when there is one in every town in Northern Virginia.

And now, I cannot stop thinking about that quote.

We hold so tightly. Sure, it’s easy to see how we might hold tightly to material things and creature comforts. It’s easy to see how we don’t want to let go of a favorite piano or a set of heirloom china. Or the house where all your babies grew.

But what about those other “things?” The things that aren’t things at all? It was Corrie ten Boom who uttered the words in that quote. It was a theme she often repeated during personal speaking engagements long after her extraordinary ordeal as a Christian who hid Jews during World War II and later survived a concentration camp. She made sure that people understood she wasn’t only talking about material things. “Even your dear family. Why? Because the Father may wish to take one of them back to himself, and when he does, it will hurt you if he must pry your fingers loose.”

We believe that God is God of all. Everything, but also everyone. As parents, we commit our lives to the well-being of our children. We encourage attachment because we know that it is healthy — both physically and emotionally — to be attached. But we have to hold loosely in order to trust Our Lord completely. We cannot grip anything so tightly that there is no room for the Holy Spirit. The truth is that God is sovereign. He is Lord of all; he already holds all our possessions and all the people we love. He asks us to know this and to willfully surrender them to him.

What to give up for Lent?

Everything.

Finding Silence

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Right now is the perfect time for “pre-Lent” — a short period of time before Ash Wednesday when we have the opportunity to prepare our hearts and our environments for Lent. The time is now to prayerfully consider how God is calling you to renew your heart, transform your mind and reform your actions in order to rediscover (or truly discover for the first time) the mystery of our risen Lord.

In order to do this important work, find some silence. In that silence, determine how to create more silence. Lent should be quiet. In order to enter into the desert of Lent, we need both interior and exterior silence. Since we live in such a very noisy world, it’s going to take some time and effort to establish silence in our lives. We need to consider carefully how to distance ourselves from the distractions that fill life with so much noise that we can’t hear Our Lord and so much stuff that we can’t see him. Our world is not conducive to quiet recollection, so if we want to pursue it for Lent (and we do), we all need to be intentional.

Cardinal Robert Sarah’s powerful book, “The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise,” is a beautiful place to begin. Don’t wait until Lent; start reading now to craft a quiet, pondering place for yourself throughout the 40 desert days.

This quest for quiet is an urgent one if we are to notice and listen to God. Cardinal Sarah writes, “Without silence, God disappears in the noise. And this noise becomes all the more obsessive because God is absent. Unless the world rediscovers silence, it is lost. The earth then rushes into nothingness.” Noise begets more noise. God won’t compete with the noise. You won’t hear him over the din of daily life.

Consider all the ways you engage in noise. We live in a world of constant conversation. At the swipe of a finger, a myriad of voices comes alive in the palms of our hands. Looking for silence? Start there. Then, consider how our smartphone habits have created new circuits in our brains. We’ve trained ourselves to always be engaged in the noise of our world. Our brain is always busy. Cardinal Sarah poses an important question: “If our ‘interior cell phone’ is always busy because we are ‘having a conversation’ with other creatures, how can the Creator reach us, how can he ‘call us’?” For human beings accustomed to being perpetually available, it’s good to ponder if our souls are similarly accessible to God.

We need to wake up to the power of silence. Noise numbs us. More accurately, we numb ourselves with noise. We are constantly hearing something, but are we truly listening? Or are we barricading our souls with a wall of noise because we are uncomfortable in the quiet? Cardinal Sarah challenges us to think about the role incessant distractions play in our lives. “Noise is a deceptive, addictive and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder and kneeling before God.”

What if this Lent is your time to encounter wonder? What if this is your season to kneel before God in silence and let him fill the void? What can you do right now to open yourself to that possibility?

Hope for what hurts

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“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Matthew 5:4

It took three decades of the same argument over and over again (with different details each time) before I recognized the pattern. I’m not proud of this slow understanding, but I am encouraged by an intimate knowledge gained over time. It was so easy for me to see my husband’s pattern when we argue, to think I knew what his goals were every time, but it took a very long time to recognize what I wanted every time. Why did I keep repeating the same pattern of argument and what did that pattern have to teach me about myself?

We’ve worked hard to know what we do now. Since I’ve long subscribed to the idea that wives would do well to sing their husbands’ praises publicly and keep the rest to private conversation, we won’t talk about his arguing style; we’ll focus on mine. I am almost always seeking reassurance. I want to know he is a safe person, ours is a solid relationship, and we are a couple that is healthy and whole. During an argument, I almost always want to be comforted.

For me, to be in conflict is to mourn. Peter Kreeft writes, “Mourning is the expression of inner discontent, of the gap between desire and satisfaction, that is, of suffering.” When I open the definition of mourning to this interpretation, and I consider my intense need for reassurance, I see what Christ intended when he promised that those who mourn will be comforted.

He promised reassurance. He is the reassurance. He is the deep certainty, the safest of safe people, the most solid of all relationships, the truest expression of wholeness. The Father sent his Son into our suffering — all of our suffering — in order to satisfy our deepest needs for intimacy, understanding and reassurance. He promised that our suffering has redemptive value.

Jesus is with us when we weep. He’s there when we mourn in the most conventional use of the word, but he’s also there in the many struggles of our everyday lives. Certainly, he is also there when it all becomes too much to bear and we despair. Jesus came to earth to sit with us as we open a bill for which there are no resources, as we answer a call that brings terrible news, as we lie seemingly alone on a medical gurney. God knows what it feels like to be rejected, to be betrayed. He knows the grief of broken relationships and prodigal children. Knowing all, he entered in. Every pain we suffer, he suffers too.

He was wounded when he walked the earth, and we wound him even now. But he doesn’t turn away. Though we cause him pain, he stays. He reassures. His presence comforts us in a way nothing or no one on earth can. Even more astounding, he endures our sins. He is steadfast when we are not. We turn away from him over and over again, with every sin, big and small, and he stays.

Emmanuel. God with us.

The redeemer of our suffering comforts us in the sorrow. When life is crushingly hard, it is the Jesus of the scourging who absorbs the blows for us. He pours himself into us and we are strengthened. With that strength born of suffering, we have strength to offer others. He is risen and we are his body here on earth, blessed and broken for others. So, we stay. We enter into the sorrow. We offer ourselves.

We reassure a hurting world that there is hope.

His name is Jesus.