By Movieguide® Staff
Author and pastor Carlos Whittaker challenges us to face the things we’re “using in your life to medicate.”
“An issue?” he said while responding to an Instagram question asking if he had “an issue” with alcohol. “I don’t have an issue. I got thousands of issues. But I think it’s important that everybody do what I did and simply stop long enough to take inventory of what it is you’re using in your life to medicate.”
Whittaker continued, “For many people, it’s not alcohol. For some of you, it’s work. For some of you, it’s chaos. For some of you, it’s control…I think if we stop long enough to name it, we’re all going to be better for it. And for me, everything in my life has gotten better since I stopped drinking. And I’m grateful for that.”
Whittaker tackled another addiction in his 2024 book Reconnected: How 7 Screen-Free Weeks with Monks and Amish Farmers Helped Me Recover the Lost Art of Being Human.
“What I thought was going to be an experiment about the perils of screens…Rapidly shifted to be an experiment about the beauty of human connection…And how to recover what has been lost in our current culture,” he wrote in an Instagram caption. “The problem isn’t the phone…It’s that we have simply forgotten how we connected before them…And so I wrote you a book to remind you of the beauty that is beyond the screen.”
In an interview with Fox News, Whittaker compared his tech detox to “coming off the drug of knowledge and the drug of control,” but said eventually, “it literally felt like an elephant stepped off my chest and I could breathe again. And I got it. But those first four days were the crazy days.”
While spending time with Benedictine monks, Whittaker spoke about getting back into the daily rhythm of prayer, saying, “I missed it so much. It created a rhythm in my day. It gave some stability to some parts of my faith that maybe were unstable.”
“What I learned from the monks is that every day, I had multiple opportunities to lower the volume of life and slow down — and when you lower the volume of life, the volume of God goes up,” he added.
Whittaker’s recent comments about sobriety are a reminder to look closely at the things we use to “medicate” and make sure they don’t hold power over us.
Read Next: How Giving Up Screens for 7 Weeks Changes Your Brain and Your Relationship With God
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