Walk into many living rooms in the evening and you will find the whole family present and almost nobody there. The television is on for one person. A teenager is on a phone in the corner of the settee. A parent is answering work messages at the dining table. Grandma is watching a church service streamed from another country on a tablet balanced against the fruit bowl. Five screens, one room, and very little conversation.
None of this is wicked. Some of it is wonderful. That same Wi-Fi lets a mother in Birmingham see her son’s face in Kingston every Sunday, lets a student finish homework, lets an elderly saint who can no longer climb the church steps hear the sermon. But technology has changed the shape of home life faster than most families have stopped to think about it, and what we do not think about tends to rule us.
How a house used to hold people together
Older houses were designed around shared things. There was one radio, later one television, one telephone on a little table in the hall. If you wanted to hear the cricket, you sat with whoever else wanted to hear it. If someone rang, the whole house knew. The verandah was where you went to catch the breeze, and so it was where you talked. People were thrown together by scarcity.
Now each person carries their own radio, television, telephone and library in their pocket. The house no longer needs to gather us to entertain or inform us. That is a genuine freedom, but it also means that gathering has to be chosen. It will not happen by accident.
What it does to the inner life
The deeper question is not about the living room but about the heart. Most believers would say they want time with God. Many would also admit that the phone is the first thing they touch in the morning and the last thing they put down at night. Prayer gets squeezed into the gaps between notifications. Scripture is read, if at all, in the same app window as the news, the group chat and the advert for a new kitchen.
The psalmist wrote, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). Stillness is now one of the scarcest things in a modern home. It is not that we are forbidden to be still; it is that stillness has constant competition. Even quiet moments, waiting for the rice to cook or for a child to finish in the bathroom, are filled with a quick scroll.
There is also the matter of comparison. Our grandparents compared their houses with the neighbours’. We compare ours with thousands of polished photographs: kitchens with marble islands, bedrooms styled for a camera, families who seem never to argue. It is hard to be content with a modest home when you spend an hour a day looking at other people’s best angles.
The good that can come through the same wire
It would be easy to write a sermon against technology and feel very holy about it. But that would ignore how much good it does in scattered Caribbean families. Consider a woman in her seventies whose children live in three different countries. For her, a video call on a Sunday afternoon is not a distraction from relationship; it is relationship. A prayer group that meets by phone at six in the morning may be the only way shift workers can pray together. A young man in a rural district can learn a trade from videos that no one nearby could teach him.
Paul told the Corinthians that although many things were permitted to him, not everything was helpful, and he refused to be mastered by any of them (see 1 Corinthians 6:12). That is a useful test for a household. The question is not whether a device is allowed, but whether it is helping, and whether anyone in the house is now under its power.
Small house rules that make room
Families who manage this well rarely do it by dramatic gestures. They make small, stubborn rules and keep them. A few that many households find helpful:
- A charging place outside the bedrooms. Phones sleep in the kitchen or hallway overnight, including the adults’ phones. It changes the first and last minutes of the day.
- One table, no devices. At least one meal a day is eaten together with screens elsewhere. If it can’t be dinner because of shifts, make it Saturday breakfast.
- A shared screen, on purpose. Instead of five people watching five things, choose something to watch together sometimes, and talk about it afterwards.
- A quiet corner. A chair, a Bible and a lamp somewhere in the house where devices do not go.
- Wi-Fi that rests. Some families set the router to switch off late at night. It sounds severe, but it protects sleep, especially for teenagers.
When you design or renovate, it is worth thinking about this too. Where will the television go, and does the living room face it or face each other? Is there a verandah or porch that invites people to sit and talk? Are there enough sockets that people need not retreat to the bedroom to charge?
Choosing to be present
In the end, technology magnifies what a household already is. A family that loves to talk will use it to talk across oceans. A family that avoids each other will use it to avoid each other more efficiently. The devices themselves are neither angels nor devils. They are tools, and tools need someone to decide what they are for.
So perhaps tonight the question is simple. Who is in the house with you right now, and when did you last look up long enough to really see them? The phone will still be there in an hour. The child on the settee will not be twelve for ever.
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