I have a confession to make right off the top: I love my phone. I love that I can find a restaurant, book a flight, and settle an argument about which NFL team has more Super Bowl rings, all before I’ve finished my coffee. Technology is genuinely one of the great gifts of our age. So this isn’t one of those “get off my lawn” sermons where the old preacher rails against screens. I’m not that guy. Mostly.

But here’s what I’ve been chewing on lately, and it’s this: we have more ways to connect with each other than any generation in human history, and yet I look around the Miami Valley and I see so many people who are desperately, achingly alone. No amount of FaceTime replaces a hug. No group chat replaces sitting across a table from someone who actually knows you. Something has gotten lost in translation, and I think it’s worth naming.

There’s a book I read years ago — a professor named John Locke wrote it a couple decades back — where he coined this phrase “solo sapiens.” His argument was that we’ve become a society that’s really good at transmitting information and really bad at actually being with one another. I think about that phrase a lot. Solo sapiens. Alone, but connected. Present in a hundred group texts and absent from the room.

Let me tell you three things E-communication can’t do, because I think naming them out loud is half the battle.

First, it can rapidly escalate a fight but almost never heals one. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Somebody hurts your feelings, and you sit down at the keyboard, and something takes over you. You start typing, and it starts feeling really good — you’re crafting this masterpiece, this airtight case, this thing that’s really going to show them. And you hit send feeling powerful. And then either immediately or a few hours later, you’re staring at your phone thinking, “Why did I send that to my boss?”

Here’s the thing about speaking versus writing: when you speak, people hear your tone. They see your face. We have a thirteen-year-old cat named Lilly at our house, and I’ll tell you, that cat has taught me more about tone than any communications seminar. If I say to her, in my sweetest voice, “Lilly, you are the most wonderful cat in the world,” she hisses at me and bolts under the bed. But if I lower my voice and say, in this warm, gravelly tone, “Lilly, you are the dumbest, most worthless cat I’ve ever had” — she melts into my leg like I just told her she won the lottery. Tone is everything. And a text message has no tone. It’s a blank canvas onto which the reader paints whatever emotion they’re already feeling. That’s why Jesus said, when someone sins against you, go and talk to them — not write them, not @ them — go, face to face. It’s slower. It’s scarier. It’s also the only thing that actually works.

Second — and I’ll tread carefully here — E can feed you sexual junk food, but it cannot nourish real intimacy. You know how it goes in a marriage. It’s a Friday night, the spark’s a little duller than it used to be, the husband comes out of the bathroom in a t-shirt that should’ve been retired in the Clinton administration, the wife’s wearing the same flannel pajamas she got as a hospital gift twenty-some years ago, and somewhere in there, the thought creeps in: maybe I’ll just look somewhere else for a little excitement. Friends, the internet will hand you that in about four seconds. But it will never, ever give you what it promises. Paul wrote — and I love how The Message puts this — that sex was never meant to be “skin on skin” alone; it’s a spiritual mystery, a soul-to-soul thing, and anything that avoids real commitment leaves you lonelier than you started. That’s the trap. It looks like intimacy. It functions like isolation.

Third, and this is the big one: E can transfer communication, but it cannot generate togetherness. The early church didn’t scatter into their private devotionals after Jesus ascended — they crammed into an upper room together. They ate together, argued together, took care of each other’s kids together. Hebrews tells us not to give up meeting together, and I know, I know — I’m glad we have church online, truly. But listening to a sermon isn’t the same as being known by a community. I learned this the hard way. Back in 2005 I had a weekly radio broadcast — “Grace Happens” — that just aired my Sunday sermon. We spent real money on it. And you know what we got? A devoted little audience of faithful radio listeners and approximately zero baptisms. My favorite story from that whole experiment: a friend told me an elderly Lutheran woman once brought a handheld radio into her church board meeting because she didn’t want to miss the end of my sermon on Revelation. I built a Lutheran fan club. I did not build community.

Let me tell you about my friend Brian. We met in sixth grade, learned to drive together, roomed together at Asbury, got ordained together, and I stood up at his wedding. For almost thirty years we’ve spent a week every summer together at Lakeside. And here’s what’s strange — I genuinely cannot remember much of anything Brian said to me during my hardest seasons. What I remember is that he was there. When I thought my world had ended over a breakup at twenty, he sat with me. When Rachel and I made our vows in Estes Chapel, he was there too. It wasn’t an email. It wasn’t a like on a post. It cost him time, gas money, a day off work. It was togetherness — man to man, soul to soul.

That’s what Jesus wanted the night before the cross. He didn’t ask Peter, James, and John for advice in the garden. He said, “Just be with me.” Not fix me. Not text me later. Be with me.

So here’s my question for you, and it’s the same one I asked our church: will you take the risk of putting the phone down and showing up? Nobody was made to be a solo sapiens. You were made for the room, not the screen.