155 – Esther Emery: What Happens When You Give Up the Internet For a Year

*Originally Posted at MissioAlliance.org

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Esther Emery used to direct stage plays in Southern California. But that was a long time ago. Now she lives with her husband and three children off the grid in a yurt, tending to three acres in the foothills of Idaho’s Rocky Mountains. She writes about faith and trying to live a fearless, free life at www.estheremery.com. Website: http://www.estheremery.com

Esther Emery was a successful playwright and theater director, wife and mother, and loving it all – until, suddenly, she wasn’t. When a personal and professional crisis of spectacular extent leaves her reeling, Esther is left empty, alone in her marriage, and grasping for identity that does not define itself by busyness and a breakneck pace of life. Something had to be done.

What Falls from the Sky is Esther’s fiercely honest, piercingly poetic account of a year without Internet – 365 days away from the good, the bad, and the ugly of our digital lives – in one woman’s desperate attempt at a reset. Esther faces her addiction to electronica, her illusion of self-importance, and her longing to return to simpler days, but then the unexpected happens. Her experiment in analog is hijacked by a spiritual awakening, and Esther finds herself suddenly, inexplicably drawn to the faith she had rejected for so long.

Ultimately, Esther’s unplugged pilgrimage brings her to a place where she finally finds the peace – and the God who created it – she has been searching for all along.

What Falls from the Sky offers a path for you to do the same. For all the ways the Internet makes you feel enriched and depleted, genuinely connected and wildly insufficient, What Falls from the Sky reveals a new way to look up from your screens and live with palms wide open in a world brimming with the good gifts of God. -From the Publisher


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One thought on “155 – Esther Emery: What Happens When You Give Up the Internet For a Year

  1. Excellent podcast – from start to finish.Thank you, Shane and Esther! And I so loved the end — we can indeed experience God in his creation — and we ought never consider this “cliché”. Church leaders across the centuries have taught that we can encounter God in creation.

    “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities- his eternal power and divine nature- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made…” – Paul (Romans 1:20)

    “I want creation to penetrate you with so much admiration that everywhere, wherever you may be, the least plant may bring to you clear remembrance of the Creator.” – Basil of Caesarea

    “Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Note it; read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink; instead He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that? Why, heaven and earth shout to you: “God made me!”” – Augustine of Hippo

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