The 47-Second Life: On Attention, Exhaustion, and the Things That Were Never Yours to Carry

Part of the Everything We Carry series — Acts 1:6-11

I installed and uninstalled Instagram at least a dozen times this week.I wish that were an exaggeration. It's not. I'm writing a sermon about attention and time, feeling the full weight of the irony, and I delete the app in a moment of conviction — only to reinstall it by 10pm because I posted something that morning and I need to know if anyone liked it. I don't want to be alone with my thoughts. I want a signal. I want to know if anything has changed.

That cycle — the delete, the reinstall, the refresh, the switch — is the problem I want to talk about. Not just as a bad habit or a tech addiction, though it can be both of those things. But as something deeper. As a symptom of how we are spending our attention, and what it's quietly costing us. And maybe, if we're honest with ourselves, as a spiritual crisis disguised as a productivity problem.

We Are Never Fully Anywhere

Here's a number that I cannot get out of my head: 47 seconds.

According to researchers at UC Irvine, that's the current average amount of time a person can look at something before feeling the compulsion to look at something else. Forty-seven seconds before your brain says, thank you, next. For context: in 2004, that number was two and a half minutes. We weren't exactly monks in 2004 — Yahoo.com was thriving, MSN was doing great, I had an HTC Diamond with Windows Mobile and I thought it was the future — but we could hold our attention on something for a hundred and fifty seconds before we needed to flee.

Now it's forty-seven.

And here's the part that makes it worse: every time you switch, there's a cost. Researchers call it the "switching cost," and it works like this — once you break your focus and look at something else, it takes approximately 23 minutes to return to full concentration on whatever you were doing. Twenty-three minutes. So when you're in a conversation and you glance at a text, when you're in prayer and you feel the pull of a notification, when you're at dinner and you just need to check one thing — it costs you twenty-three minutes of real presence. And because we're switching every forty-seven seconds, the math is ugly: we are never fully anywhere. We are always somewhere between the last thing and the next thing, skimming the surface of our own lives.

I don't tell you this to make you feel bad about your phone. I tell you this because I think it helps explain something that a lot of us feel but can't quite name: the exhaustion that has nothing to do with how much sleep you got.

The Wrong Question at the Worst Possible Moment

Acts 1 gives us a scene that I find both frustrating and deeply comforting in equal measure.

It's forty days after the resurrection. Forty days of what Luke describes as Jesus appearing, teaching, and eating with his disciples — forty days of private tutorials from the risen Christ. And after all of that, after everything they've witnessed and been taught, the disciples gather together and ask Jesus the following question:

"Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" (Acts 1:6)

They want a date. A timeline. A calendar notification that says: this is when God fixes everything. And I've spent time being frustrated with the disciples for this — until I realized I ask the same question every morning before my feet hit the floor. Is it over yet? Is it better? Has anything changed? The doom scroll at 10pm is my version of their question. Refresh, refresh, switch apps, refresh — checking if the kingdom has been restored yet.

From their perspective, the question made sense. Their expectations of the Messiah didn't include crucifixion, resurrection in the middle of history, and then... waiting. They expected a political victory. The restoration of Israel. The end of empire. And instead they got three confusing days and a risen Jesus who keeps showing up for breakfast and still hasn't overthrown Rome. So yes — they want a timeline. I get it.

"I ask the same question every morning before my feet hit the floor. Is it over yet? Is it better? Has anything changed?"

But Jesus doesn't answer the question. He says: "It is not for you to know the times or the periods that the Father has set by his own authority." (Acts 1:7) Which is not the answer anyone wanted. But then he pivots — hard. The sentence turns. But — you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes. And — you will be my witnesses. In Jerusalem first, then Judea, then Samaria, then the ends of the earth.

They asked when. Jesus answered with where.

Start here. Start with these people. Start in your own zip code.

The Most Well-Disguised Form of Avoidance

After Jesus finishes saying this — after the clearest commission they've ever been given — he ascends. A cloud takes him out of their sight. And the disciples do precisely nothing.

They stand there. They stare at the sky. Luke stacks the verbs to make sure we understand just how locked-in their upward gaze is: they watch, they gaze intently, and the phrase "into heaven" appears four times in two verses. It's been about thirty seconds since Jesus told them to go be witnesses, and nobody has moved.

So two figures in white robes show up — the same two who appeared at the empty tomb, who asked the women: "Why do you look for the living among the dead?" (Luke 24:5) — and now they ask the disciples a version of the same question: "Why do you stand looking into the sky?" (Acts 1:11)

I've come to believe that these two figures have the most clarifying job in all of Scripture. Their entire function seems to be showing up wherever people are frozen and asking, gently but directly: can you please move?

Here's what gets me about this moment: the disciples weren't staring at nothing. They were looking at the holiest thing they had ever seen. The angels didn't tell them they were looking in the wrong direction. They said they were standing still. The problem wasn't the object of their attention. It was the posture. They had held a position past its usefulness, and what started as worship had quietly become a stuck hiding place.

"One of the most well-disguised forms of avoidance is devotion."

I think about this a lot in progressive faith spaces, because I'm guilty of it myself. I can spend three hours in my biblical Greek and Hebrew software and never call the friend who told me last Tuesday that they were struggling. I can learn all the right language, read all the right books, share all the right posts — and never have a real conversation with a single person who disagrees with me about anything. I can binge a podcast about community and eat alone every night. I can know everything about the genocide and nothing about the person who sits behind me on Sundays.

I've done all of these things. The upward gaze is real, and it can look like faithfulness from the outside. But the angels' question cuts through it: why are you standing here?

The Architecture of a Yes

Here's what I keep coming back to as a foundation for what I'm calling the stewardship of time: knowing what's mine and what isn't.

Jesus removes one responsibility from the disciples — the timeline, the management of God's calendar, the mastery over when — and replaces it with something else: presence, power, witness. My no, then, is informed by that. I say no to being the manager of God's schedule. I don't control the outcome of the next election, or the next crisis, or what the breaking news notification says at 11pm. That's not my job. It was never my job.

Ashley Williams, a researcher at Harvard who studies what she calls "time poverty," found something that genuinely surprised me: feeling like you don't have enough time harms your wellbeing more than unemployment. More than financial poverty. The perception that your time is not yours is one of the most corrosive things that can happen to a human being.

"Every yes that doesn't belong to you costs you something you cannot get back. And every honest no creates room for a whole yes."

I say yes to committees because guilt was louder than wisdom. I say yes to extra projects because I want to seem indispensable. I say yes to carrying someone else's emotional crisis because I've confused compassion with codependence. And slowly, without realizing it, my calendar fills up with other people's priorities, and I have nothing left — not for the people who actually need me, not for the work that's actually mine, not even for myself.

A holy no isn't withdrawal. It isn't selfishness. It's how you make room for a whole yes. One real conversation instead of six half-hearted ones. One meal where you're present instead of three where you're somewhere else. One prayer where you actually stay long enough to hear something, instead of ten where you checked a box.

Start in Jerusalem

So here's what I'm working on, and I'm preaching this entirely to myself.

First, a yes audit. Look at your actual calendar — not the one you wish you had, but the one you're living. How many of those commitments are genuinely yours? How many of them did you take on because you couldn't tolerate the discomfort of saying no? If something doesn't belong to you, it's okay to set it down. That's the "it is not for you to know" principle applied to a random Thursday.

Second, name your Jerusalem. Jesus didn't say go everywhere at once. He said start where you are. Your Jerusalem might be the person across from you at dinner tonight. It might be the friend you've been meaning to check on for three weeks. It might be your kid who keeps trying to show you something on their iPad while you're scrolling on your own. Stewardship of time starts in one room. One conversation. One text you've been putting off.

My kids spent spring break running a make-believe hair salon called Time to Dye. They made a price list, taped flyers all over the house, and when no one came, they made a second round of signs that said "HELP. It's Time to Dye. We're running out of money." We all eventually sat down and got our hair done and my father-in-law got his nails painted. It took maybe twenty minutes. For them, it was everything. And I almost missed it because I had things to do that were, in retrospect, nobody's things.

Third, let your phone disciple you less. I'm not going to tell you to throw it in a river. I've tried the delete-everything approach. I last until bedtime. But we all get to decide when our phones get to talk to us. Notifications off at dinner. Phone in the other room when someone is talking to you. When you give someone your full attention, you're telling them — with your body, not just your words — that they are worth more than whatever might be happening somewhere else. That is a form of witness. That is the Imago Dei, honored in real time.

Between the Going and the Coming

The disciples asked about the kingdom. Jesus said: the Kronos is not yours. But the kingdom is coming — and that promise holds regardless of the news cycle, the political chaos, or however fragmented your Wednesday feels.

The ascension didn't close the story. It opened it. Ten days after Jesus goes up, the Spirit comes down. The witnesses scatter from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. And the kingdom unfolds across centuries in a pattern none of them could have predicted or controlled.

We are somewhere in the middle of that unfolding. And our job has never been to figure out when it ends. Our job is to be here — with these people, in this place — carrying only what we can carry, and saying only the yeses we can keep.

The question isn't how much time we have left. The question is what we're doing with the time we've been given.

Start there. Just start there.