The Quiet Discipline of Not Checking

The Mega Millions jackpot has climbed again. By the time you read this, someone may have won, or it may have rolled over once more. Either way, millions of people are doing the same thing: checking their phones.

Not just once. Over and over. Refreshing the lottery website. Scanning news apps. Waiting for the numbers to post. Then, after the drawing, checking their tickets against the results. Then checking again, just to be sure. Then imagining what they'd do with the money. Then checking one more time.

This isn't really about the lottery. It's about the spiritual discipline we've almost entirely lost: the ability to not check.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his followers not to worry about tomorrow. "Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?" It's often treated as advice about anxiety, which it is. But it's also about attention. About where we direct the gaze of our minds. About what we rehearse and re-rehearse in the theater of our inner life.

The modern equivalent of worrying about tomorrow is checking. Checking the weather. Checking the news. Checking our accounts. Checking our notifications. Checking to see if the thing we're waiting for has happened yet. Checking if anything has changed in the last seven minutes.

We've built devices that make checking effortless, instant, and infinitely repeatable. The lottery just makes the mechanism visible. People don't compulsively check their tickets because they're greedy. They check because they can't not check. The possibility of knowledge sits in their pocket, one tap away, and the urge to resolve uncertainty becomes overwhelming.

This is the opposite of faith.

Faith, in the Christian understanding, is not wishful thinking or blind optimism. It's a settled posture toward reality. It's the decision to live as if certain things are true—God is good, the future is held, your life has meaning—before you have proof. Before you can check.

The spiritual formation that Jesus describes, and that the early church practiced, assumed long stretches of not knowing. You prayed, and you didn't immediately check to see if God had answered. You planted, and you waited for the harvest without digging up the seeds every morning to see if they'd sprouted. You trusted someone with a letter, and you didn't track its journey in real-time.

You couldn't check. So you learned to live in the space between action and outcome. You learned patience, which is not the same as passivity. You learned to hold your desires lightly. You learned that your inner peace could not depend on constant updates.

We've lost that space almost entirely.

The lottery dramatizes this because the stakes feel high and the wait is short. But the same pattern plays out everywhere. We check our bank balance multiple times a day, as if looking at the number will change it. We check the forecast obsessively, as if knowing whether it will rain on Thursday will help us in any way on Monday. We check social media to see if anyone has responded to us, not because we need the information, but because we can't tolerate the uncertainty.

The desert fathers and mothers had a word for this kind of restlessness: acedia. It's often translated as sloth, but it's closer to a spiritual listlessness, an inability to stay present, a compulsion to flee from the current moment into distraction or fantasy. They considered it one of the most dangerous spiritual states, because it made every other practice impossible.

You can't pray if you're checking your phone every two minutes. You can't meditate. You can't have a real conversation. You can't read deeply. You can't rest. The discipline of attention is the foundation of every other discipline, and we've systematically dismantled it.

The technology itself isn't evil. Having information available isn't wrong. But we've let the possibility of checking colonize our consciousness. We've trained ourselves to treat every small uncertainty as an emergency, every unanswered question as unbearable.

The spiritual counter-practice is simple but difficult: choose not to check.

Buy the lottery ticket if you want. But then put it away. Decide you won't look at the numbers until tomorrow morning. Or the next day. Not because you don't care about winning, but because you're practicing the ancient art of living without constant updates.

Check the weather once in the morning, then trust that you've prepared as well as you can. Let your bank balance sit unobserved for three days. Resist the urge to refresh your email right after you send something important.

These small acts of restraint are not about self-punishment. They're about reclaiming the part of yourself that can hold uncertainty without panic. The part that can act and then release the outcome. The part that can live in God's time instead of demanding that all knowledge be immediately available.

Jesus in the wilderness, fasting for forty days, was practicing this on a scale we can barely imagine. He chose to live in the not-yet. No immediate relief. No checking to see if the trial was over. Just presence, and trust, and the long slow work of being human before God without shortcuts.

We're not called to forty days in the wilderness. But we might be called to forty minutes without checking our phones. To buy a lottery ticket and then forget about it. To plant a seed and let it grow in the dark.

The jackpot will be won or it won't. The ticket in your wallet will either match the numbers or it won't. But your soul's formation happens in the space where you choose to wait without knowing. Where you practice trust instead of surveillance. Where you remember that your life is more than the sum of things you can verify in real-time.

That's the quiet discipline. Not the lottery. Not the winning. Just the patient, countercultural act of not checking.