Tracking Our Lives

Our family has discovered fitness trackers. It started with the kids who had friends at school with them and so asked for them for their birthday. Then Elizabeth thought maybe one would help her be active throughout the day. And then, when she decided the cheap, off-brand one I had gotten her wasn’t really all that comfortable, it became mine.

I haven’t worn a watch, or anything similar, in well over ten years. I have a dress watch I pull out of its box in the closet just often enough to discover that the battery has run dead again. But I thought I might as well give this fitness-tracker-watch-thingy a try, since the other option was placing it in a box in the closet.

I’ve been wearing it for about five days now. I’m not sure what to make of it. I don’t think I really trust it—did I really walk 18,000 steps yesterday, but only 1,200 the day before? I still haven’t figured out how to read text messages on it—something it claims I should be able to do. It’s an off-brand, so it’s a bit limited in its functionality.

One of the features I’m most taken with is its sleep-tracking function. It figures out when I’m asleep and then records whether I’m in deep sleep or light sleep, giving me a report the next morning on my sleep patterns. I’m not sure how it does this. I suspect it just makes it up.

Forgive me if I sound a bit skeptical. It’s mostly because two nights ago I stayed up late reading a book. When I went back the next morning to check my sleep report from that night’s sleep, the fitness tracker reported that I had started sleeping two hours before I remember going to bed. I suspect I must have tricked it into thinking I was sleeping by holding my wrist still while reading and lowering my heart rate by being sedentary. Elizabeth, however, has more faith in the fitness tracker. She seems to suspect that maybe it wasn’t wrong at all. For some reason, she chuckles as she tells me this. And the really strange thing is—in those two hours before we went to bed, Elizabeth read a book and a half, and I got through about four pages.

I wonder what would happen if we had a spiritual-life tracker. Something that helps us know how much time we spend each day in prayer, in Scripture reading, or other spiritual practices. Something that would help us set goals for these spiritual practices and send us text messages of encouragement when we achieved them.

Would it lead to Pharisaic practices and a form of legalism? Reading the Bible or praying just to get our “steps” in rather than out of a desire to spend time with God? Would we be tempted to fall into a “holier-than-thou” posture and share on Facebook how much time praying we achieved today? Would it simply lead to feelings of guilt about not doing enough spiritually? Or, like me with the fitness tracker and the time I thought I had spent reading, might it reveal some hard truths—like maybe we don’t invest nearly as much in our spiritual lives as we would like others (or maybe even ourselves) to believe.