While the world went gaga for Pokemon Go this week (and by “world”, I mainly mean “my wife and her best friend”), I was trying out some other apps: MyFitnessPal, Goodbudget, and GiantSlayers. Health, money, and discipleship—these were the ostensible aims of these respective apps. (I know, GiantSlayers sounds like a video game app, but it’s actually a Bible-verse/devotional service. Bear with me).
I wish I could say that it was spiritual insight that led me to these apps, but I actually got to the Bible-app last. My app fascination started with my desire to do something about my increasing waistline. My motivation was less personal vanity than general healthiness. I knew the way I was eating wasn’t good for my body, and I wanted to be healthier for my baby girl. I had read a really good book at the beginning of the summer called Mindless Eating that really put a fine point on the ways in which we consume in ways we’re not really aware of. Just that head knowledge alone, however, wasn’t enough to curb my appetite, and I knew that if I wanted something to happen, I was going to need more than my own personal will-power to lessen my portion size or what I snacked on.
This is where MyFitnessApp came in. It’s a phone app that’s a glorified calorie counter, but it has some great tools: a barcode scanner that immediately calls up info on the products you’re eating/drinking, a way to enter recipes for dishes that aren’t pre-packaged and still come up with a calorie count, and a database filled with the nutritional info on lots of local restaurants. Now I had a way to be self-aware of how much I took at dinner or what I ate between breakfast and lunch. My goals were modest, so my target calorie count was still pretty high. I wasn’t starving myself by any means, and yet I was still able to be more aware of ways in which I could pile on calories. On Thursday, my wife and I went downtown to one of our favorite restaurants, Fast and French. I had to guess at the calorie count, but having done it for a week, I could plan accordingly. Then I had probably my favorite downtown treat: a salted caramel blondie from Normandy Farms bakery. Again, I knew how much that dessert counted from doing a little database work. At the end of the day, I was still able to get under my calorie count, but only because I had cut out my typical between meal snacks. If I want to eat that way for lunch, I’m going to have to sacrifice elsewhere. Lesson learned.
I’ll pass over Goodbudget except to say that it’s a cute app that puts your monthly budget in marked envelopes, makes it easy to enter new transactions (i.e. things you spend money on), and keep a visual reminder of how much left you have in certain envelopes. Again, the point is self-awareness about where your money is going and how much of it you have left given your monthly income. There are like twenty-seven of these.
The real headturner for me was the GiantSlayer app, and my experience with it this week is a testimony to how difficult day-to-day discipleship can be. I have my normal devotions routine down for the summer: first thing in the morning, I read a Jesus Calling reading, follow that up with prayer, and then examine in detail one chapter of the Bible. As a way of encouraging daily mindfulness, I had started taking one of the Jesus Calling scriptures for the day as my daily verse, writing it down on a notecard and carrying it with me. That worked for about two weeks before I started to forget the card was in my pocket. Given my experience with MyFitnessPal and Goodbudget, I wondered if there was a comparable discipleship app that helped make you more aware of your spiritual inclinations during the day. I found GiantSlayer, an app that basically sends you texts of scripture and devotional thoughts twice an hour for as many hours as you want throughout the day. I set the app to 12 hours, and the messages started rolling in. The verses were ones worth meditating on, and the app gives you a prompt question and space for notes for your own thoughts.
And yet, after a couple of days, I found myself not calling up the app every time I got a message. When I checked the app last night, I had 15 unread messages. “Wow,” I thought, “I have already started tuning the scripture and encouragement out.” To tell you the truth, I probably would have done the same had I been getting encouragement about weight loss through the day or statistics about high sugar or caloric intake. The app works because it forces me to enter my own data. Unless I want to get better at entering notes, I won’t see the same results in my spiritual growth.
Now maybe the MySanctficationPal app exists, a way of keeping track of prayer requests, things to ask forgiveness for, applications for scripture, and moments of spiritual clarity. But maybe the problem is discipleship can’t be quantitatively measured like that, and that the Holy Spirit, the fellowship of other believers, the Word, and time are the only things that are going to help make the most important things the things I think about the most.