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members. It has made distant places close, and close places distant. “Many of us strain our eyes toward the ends of the earth — and miss this little patch of earth called here.” Used rightly, knowledge of distant people and places can serve us; news from elsewhere can help us live more wisely here. Yet it can also make us fools: “The discerning sets his face toward wisdom,” Solomon tells us, “but the eyes of a fool are on the ends of the earth” (Proverbs 17:24). Many of us strain our eyes toward the ends of the earth — and miss this little patch of earth called here. Like a man who mistakes binoculars for eyeglasses, we often know more about distant matters than about the needs, struggles, joys, and griefs of the ordinary people nearby. Easily, perhaps without our even noticing it, screens exile us. At home online, we become strangers at home. Multiplacing We might call our attempt to live both there and here “multiplacing,” a cousin of the famous myth of multitasking. Multitasking, we now know, is just a clever name for a common illusion. We never really do two tasks at once but instead switch back and forth, eroding both focus and productivity in the process. In trying to handle two tasks simultaneously, we handle neither as well as we could. So with multiplacing. Just as we cannot focus on two tasks at once, neither can we live in two places at once. Time and attention are zero-sum games. The more time we spend with faraway friends, the less time we spend with nearby neighbors. The more attention we give to national or international news, the less attention we give to local news. The more our eyes rest on the ends of the earth, the less they rest on our spouses, children, and local church. The digital world can trick us into thinking we can split these finite selves. But in trying to live both here and there, giving our best attention to distant places while inhabiting a local place, we end up living nowhere well. We likely all know the feeling of being with someone whose phone seems strapped to his hand. Every minute or so, his eyes dart down, his thumb scrolls, his laughter and uhuhs go on autopilot. His body is here, his mind there — but where is he? Nowhere at all. Two Places at Once So far, we have been reckoning with realities of creation. In the beginning, God “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of [our] dwelling place” (Acts 17:26). He set our bodies in a local place among local people, deciding that we should live and move and have our being here and not there. He holds our lot (Psalm 16:5). We learn the same lesson from redemption, even though, in a sense, the redeemed do live in two places simultaneously. Paul greets the Philippian Christians, “To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi . . .” (Philippians 1:1). As with all Christians everywhere, the Philippians had been “raised up with [Christ] Photo by Boris Baldinger - Unsplash.com 13 Lulju-Settembru 2023 hajja