The following post is from Casey Callahan, Cooperative Student Fellowship Coordinator at Clemson University in South Carolina.

Something new is happening to the human brain, and there’s not much you or I can do to stop it.  In this Digital Age of distractions, we are becoming better suited to do multiple things at once, and with increasingly remarkable ease and style.  This is not just about the alteration our habits; it’s also about the functional alteration of our brains.

But.  (There’s always a but.)

What is this doing to our souls?  What is happening to our spiritual selves as we are moving farther and faster through the Shallows?

This was the driving question behind the Cooperative Student Fellowship (CSF) Fall Retreat held in Hendersonville, N.C., the first weekend of October.  Students joined together from CSF groups at Clemson, Furman, Georgia, Georgia Tech and Winthrop, along with a group from FBC Asheville. 

Launching from the NY Times bestseller The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Nicholas Carr, 2011), worship gatherings prompted students to consider how this relatively new way of being human is affecting the way we Christians “live, move and have our being” (Acts 17:28a).

Proclamation and conversations focused on moving beyond shallow worship, shallow theology, shallow relationships and shallow living.  Breakouts even included discussion around Scriptural texts and topics that have been drained of depth for far too long, such as Psalm 137 and Lamentations 3 (God tore me to pieces?), Psalm 5:5 and Malachi 1:3 (God hates?), I Samuel 17 (God-approved stoning?) and Genesis 18 & Psalm 13 (Does God bite?).

No, this retreat did not lead students to forever quit Facebook or downgrade their smartphones for boring phones with no data plan.  And yes, students, just like their campus ministers, will continue to multitask throughout the day, struggling to maintain singular focus on any one thing (or person) at a time.

But as we ever-so-briefly slowed the pace of life (and demand for wi-fi) in the NC mountains, we found ourselves gradually saturated with a deeper sense of self, community, worship and God.  And besides checking football scores, we were also much less obsessed with looking down at the world within our phones.

Sometimes, like the woman at the well, we realize that we’ve been missing out on Living Water.  And other times, as in the days of Jeremiah, we realize that we’ve been carrying around cracked cisterns that can barely hold Living Water at all.

The technology is new.  So is the neurological functionality within our brains.  The underlying problem persists.  God be gracious.