Living in a Distracted World and Following Jesus Into a New Year
The new year can bring the hope of a fresh start… or the dread of more of the same.
In this first episode of the year, Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen name what many of us are already feeling: life feels heavy, noisy, and hard to keep up with.
They talk about the “stone in the shoe” of modern life—how distraction, overwhelm, and unresolved trauma slowly wear us down—and share practical ways to respond. That might look like stepping back from constant media, creating gentle daily rhythms of prayer, worship, and Scripture, or using journaling and writing to slow your thoughts and reconnect with what matters most.
At the heart of the conversation is a simple but challenging invitation: to stay awake to suffering without losing hope, and to let love, humility, and courage shape how we live. Reflecting on Romans 12, we’re invited to resist chaos and despair and instead lean into the kind of formation that only comes from following Jesus.
This episode is about 40 minutes long. After listening, consider taking a few extra minutes (maybe even more than a few) to reflect on how you want to enter the new year: more grounded, more aware, and more spiritually centered.
As Dan says in closing, “It would be great if it’s a happy new Year… but may it be one in which our lives are more formed in Jesus.”
Episode Transcript:
Dan: Happy New Year, Rachael.
Rachael: Happy New Year, Dan.
Dan: And to all of our friends who honor us by just being willing to sort of join us in at times a kind of meandering reflection on the nature of life, your life, my life, and our lives together. So welcome to the new year, and before we jump in, just how did the year end for you, Michael, your family?
Rachael: Yeah, I mean, overall, I would say just for many people, 2025 was a really hard year that was also filled with a lot of sweetness and a lot of goodness. And so I think that year ended holding both of those things, like a lot of sickness in our home, travel to be with loved ones, a lot of exhaustion from keeping teenagers on the move and our toddler alive and well. So yeah, I think coming into this new year, yeah. Well, we’re going to talk mor e about this. We have a lot intentioned that feels more just like trauma care…
Dan: Yeah, trauma care.
Rachael: …than anything. So tell me a little bit about how your year ended.
Dan: I would echo and say ditto, but what I also noticed was simple tasks toward what I would say about mid to late December through pretty much the end of the year, I had just a very difficult time doing simple things like a phone call, I would put off, procrastinate, wait for it, and then not do it, and then feel terrible. And then it would show up at about two in the morning when I made my nocturnal movement to the bathroom, and it’d be like, oh God, I didn’t do that phone call. Oh, got to do that as soon as I get up in the morning. Did I? No. I think there was goodness. I don’t want to deny just sweetness and goodness, but what I would say is it was a bit like having a stone in my shoe that I know I just need to stop, sit down, take out. But for some reason, I just kept walking and hoping that it would get better. And it never really did until we began to do a little bit of the work of what we’re doing today. And that is, okay, how are we going to move into the new year and what it required for Becky and I was kind of going, what are the threats? What are the threats? And how are we now, before the year fully ends, how are we going to engage for the new year? So I wish I were saying it was just really sweet, wonderful, great rest and lot of play. It was, yes, and a stone in our shoe.
Rachael: Well, and it’s almost like when I hear you talking, I also think about, we’ve been very privileged to travel to a few different places in the midst of crisis, like hurricane relief or a significant heartbreak in a community. And it’s almost like, well, I’m laughing… When you are talking ’cause I’m like, oh yeah, this postpartum life with a toddler is basically everything you named. So yeah, okay. I’ve just been there. I’ve just been there for, that’s where I live. That’s the place I live. And there’s so much beauty. And also I haven’t made that phone call because it’s still 18th in the queue of all the things demanding my attention, and it seems to just stay there. But when I hear you talking, it’s just, and maybe this, we will get into this, but this is part of what Michael and I were talking about. I mean, so much goodness in this past year, so much hardness or hardship, and it’s like we feel a deep need to slow down and to take stock and to move into this new year in some different ways than maybe we would’ve anticipated. And I think there’s a wisdom in that, and it’s almost like all this trauma-informed care that we’ve spent years discerning and learning and trying to develop. It’s hard when in some ways you feel like you’ve got a call on it in seasons that maybe don’t feel warranted in the way that they have in other seasons. So I don’t know if that rings true for you.
Dan: There was another shooting toward the end of the year at Brown University, and then in the same weekend, the massacre on Bondi Beach in Australia at the beginning of Hanukkah, and then Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered. And in the context of all that, I did find myself having this sense of everything’s degenerating. Everything’s so bound to this intersection of division, discord, polarization attack, us versus them. And you and I really do have this incredible privilege, but it didn’t feel that way in the middle of it. I don’t have a voice, I don’t have any influence. I don’t really have any way to engage this sense of the winds and the rain. That was also the season where we had massive flooding in Washington and the state of Washington and friends who live in Bellingham, friends who live in a number of cities where there had to be an extraction for their survival. And again, it hearkens back to the beginning of the year and the fires in California, that was…
Rachael: The New Orleans, yeah.
Dan: So again, to hold what we’re asking ourselves and others to hold is holding death and resurrection, holding goodness, but holding something of the exhaustion that comes with the letdown, at least for us in that season around Christmas. So as we begin to enter into the year, you just can’t throw the calendar away and say, it’s a new year, happy New Year, and let’s get moving. Yet. There is that novelty that we often feel an appropriate sense of, this is when health clubs came their greatest number of members because we overate in December and now we’re going to get back in shape. And there is something both novel, good, but also unrealistic about entering that. So when I name degeneration, division Discord, I’m wondering what you, does that ring true?
Rachael: Oh, absolutely.
Dan: If so, how are you thinking about what it means to engage this new year?
Rachael: Yeah, it absolutely rings true. You don’t have to look very far to feel that. I mean, even just, I think about this when I’m driving. I know we talk a lot about my driving, but it’s like driving in Philly has gotten even more extreme. And I feel like it’s a microcosm of just the fight, flight, freeze response that people are in. And you and I have talked about this. I’m actually entering this new year with a different relationship with social media, which feels counterintuitive when you have a podcast and a public facing presence. There’s kind of this expectation that you need to be engaging people in that way. But I just found with even the introduction of artificial intelligence into the algorithms that we are deeply shaped by that. I noticed this sense of discord and division and degeneration showing up even in how drastically different we engage with social media and what we’re taking in and how it’s shaping our imagination. I’ve just felt this deep invitation from the spirit to unplug, not from reality, not from the… because I am someone who feels deeply called to stay sober about what we’re facing, how people are suffering, and where we’re called as followers of Jesus to be faithfully, joyfully, humbly responsive. And so it’s not about unplugging from life and reality and the news, it’s just I have found I am addicted. I am having trouble not reaching for my phone when I’m playing with my daughter. And again, it’s to almost stay hypervigilant informed about the growing discord and division and degeneration and feeling such powerlessness. I think I really resonate with your sense of what leverage do we have to even attend to this in a way that could bring about a shift, a disruption? And again, I’m also seeing on social media a place that I feel connected. A lot of people who are showing that what it means to love, what it means to resist evil, what it means to be peacemakers, true peacemakers, not avoidant like kumbaya. Let’s hold hands. But true peacemakers who can lean into truth and suffer with others and tell the truth. So I’m not saying social media is all bad. I’m just saying for myself, I’ve been in a season where I feel the spirit saying, there are things you’re meant to tend to in your world. You’re being present with your kids, intentionally writing more that you’re not doing because you’re staying in this constant cortisol loop and you feel like you’re doing something because taking in information and you’re trying to metabolize it and you’re trying to recommunicate it to people. But in a way and in a platform that I think for myself, I’m realizing I need to focus and center my imagination in different ways. And again, that doesn’t mean unplugging from reality and having that really privileged view where you’re just like, I don’t want to be dragged down by suffering. It’s like, well, no, because I’m actually invested in people’s lives in a way that even if I’m not online, it’s with me. So yeah, it actually feels very relevant. And so yeah, I can talk more about what does that mean for me? I’m not going to lie. There is this urge in me to just go completely back to a landline and really get off of devices in a way that brings me back. But I think what it means for me is actually staying connected through things like Substack in different ways, but ultimately centering Jesus in a way. And for me, that’s looked more like making space for contemplation. I know for you that’s led to, and also really taking in the Eucharist, really coming to the table with a sense of, we can’t do this without you, Jesus. We really can’t.
Dan: We never could, but even more so. And one of the things that as a habit, as a ritual, Becky and I have always watched a national news show, usually for a season NBC and then ABC. And I was in conversation with my son-in-law who used to work in New York…
Rachael: Oh, that’s right.
Dan: …at NBC. And we were talking about how the structure of the 30 minutes, usually there are two or three leading stories, and they’ll give anywhere for two to three minutes per story with breaks, of course advertisements. But then once you get about to the 12th to the 15th minute, they begin to thin things out. So you get to watch maybe a minute or two up until about 13 till the hour, and then sometimes the actual information they’re offering is 10 seconds and then somewhere between a minute and a half to three minutes of ads. So it’s ridiculous because the way they keep you there is something very entertaining and often good news that as you have walked through something of the horrible heartache that you’ve just watched, there’s something in your body rightfully that craves something good, something intriguing and honoring. And that’s what it’s set up for to keep you there. It’s not to inform you maybe some, but mostly to keep you in the show, to get the advertising money that’s tied to that. And again, without talking about post-capitalism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, I’ll just say that we just came to a point of going, we can get probably all the news that they have just offered in about a five minute period by looking at two or three other sites. Why are we spending a half hour doing that? And again, it’s not the issue of you’ve got to make use of every second, but far more, is there another way to be centered, to be connected, to have a sense of a larger life and community? And it was simple. We now listen to five to 10 minutes of apps that help us begin to pray and then time to be able to worship with music and then time for prayer. It’s the best half hour of the week, but we feel the draw back every night, every night back to, are we going to watch news? I really did want to see what’s happening with regard to… and it’s like, ooh, the addictive process. But in that, I think I can also tie from this sense of division and degeneration and discord, ah, the pull to distraction.
Rachael: Yeah.
Dan: That’s what, to me…
Rachael: It’s a little bit what I’m, yeah, both things feel true. What I was talking about too, with social media.
Dan: I just don’t want to be as connected to the things around me, to the people around me. It’s almost like I don’t seem to have space, time, energy or heart to be as engaged as I was. And is that just because I’m a 73-year-old man?
Rachael: No, and I mean, part of what I think we have to just really name clearly is a little bit what you are putting words to. We are living in a world that is dependent upon us being distracted and actually is engineered to keep us distracted in multiple layers. When you think about how fast paced we move, when you think about how most people can’t even watch TV anymore without needing to also be on a second device, those are pretty profound levels of the brain needing, what do they call it…
Dan: Dopamine.
Rachael: …more and more dopamine, which again leaves you in a little, I mean, when I think about dopamine distraction, I think about when Michael told me he wanted to start dating because he called me from Vietnam at his sister’s wedding after we had been friends for a long season, and he had actually dated other people. And I was like, whatever, I give up on you and whatever. But he called me and I was so high on dopamine that I left the tea kettle on for eight hours in my apartment. Now, I am not someone who makes those kinds of, I am a safety first, triple check everything, kind of person. So it was one of those moments where I was like, wow, I’m so high right now, so distracted that I literally almost burned down Dave and Chelle Stern’s house with an, and I got there with the last bit of steam coming out of the tea kettle. I mean, it really was insane. But I kind of give that extreme example just to say, yes, we live in a world that keeps us constantly distracted. And I think that’s why I wanted to move, not in a uninformed way, but it’s a different thing to read an essay on Substack that’s summarizing something that’s happened in the world and bringing in multiple viewpoints and has done fact checking and is actually inviting me to get back in my critical thinking, taking in language like reading, actually having to read and slow down and think about something without just reacting to it. I think about how much information I’m getting fast paced in this world, but then I’m not paying attention to the actual information of the faces of the people around me, of my neighbors, of the human beings I’m interacting with. I’m not in my body in a way that I most want to be in my body. And again, we’ve talked so much on this podcast that other forms of distraction that come because we’re hurting where we turn to addictions or things that numb us because it feels too threatening or too hard to feel what we’re feeling. So when I think about disrupting distraction, I’m like, we’re up against these systems of our world that are kind of coming at us in every way, shape and form, and we’re up against what we’re feeling and holding inside that maybe we don’t actually have the friendships or the care providers to be present with our suffering in a way that doesn’t feel intolerable. So I have a lot of compassion for this one, and it’s one that I can be really kind of judgmental towards myself, like just quit being so distracted. And I just want to add what I told you at the beginning when we were talking about language and not finding words, or this was a conversation you and I were having. I’m constantly interrupted by a tiny human, and it’s the greatest privilege of my life. I truly can hold these two things at the same time, greatest joy and privilege to be her mother. And to be 44 and have someone interrupting you and demanding your attention at least every three minutes, I’m pretty sure they’ve said, is a form of torture to not let you complete a thought. I can’t multitask. So I mean the levels of not just distraction, but I think inundation with so much that leads to a kind of dissociation also feels true. And some of it’s for really good reasons.
Dan: Oh, it’s natural chaos and the inevitability of that, the reality that she’s got well over a trillion cell connections that are so budding and moving that everything literally every day is a whole new set of reality. And the good news with that is that by about age four and a half, five, somewhere around in there is what they call neuron pruning, meaning thank God her brain doesn’t continue to operate at that trillion level connections, just comes back down to several billion.
Rachael: But I mean, there’s nothing more humbling and convicting than a three-year-old saying, mom, put your phone down. Mom, put your phone down. Look me in the eyes, because when I’m muting her to listen to me, I say, look me in the eyes so that we could pay attention. So when she’s like, mom, put your phone down. Look me in the eyes. I’m like, well.
Dan: And again, if we say that’s honorable natural chaos, but we’re actually putting words to the fact that the world around us, the systems of the world, and ultimately our battle is not with flesh and blood, but with the unseen world of principalities and powers, want chaos. And one of the things that I came across as I was reading a book, and it was talking about how the current philosophy undergirding conservative political movement without going into the details, but the phrase that was used is “embracing Machiavelli in order to restore Aristotelian thinking”. And I know a lot of people right now are going, what? Boring, already boring. But again, Machiavelli was a 15th century courtesan politician, philosopher in some sense, theologian, but who basically underscored that the power of a government was in the ability to create chaos and then order it through its own authoritarian power. He wrote something called The Prince, and again, not to get into the details, but to underscore that today that many of the right-oriented meaning right-wing oriented politicians and particularly the Republican party, have consciously said, Machiavelli is our model for how to restore our government and our culture to a right way to live. And the right way is the Aristotelian understanding of Plato’s notion of there’s a form that’s there. We need to come back to the right way of doing things. Again, not trying to get us too far into the weeds, but let me underscore, we have a culture right now that wants you to lose your mind. And in some sense, just give it over to those who are currently in power. They’re going to do the right thing. They’re going to create the right thing. And just like Trump’s statement about the economy before the year ended when asked, how’s the economy? It’s an A++, five pluses. I won’t go through it all. So you’re back to a reality of exaggeration, hyperbole, chaos, a kind of grandiosity that is so normative now that we don’t even blanch when we hear the absolutely absurd and ridiculous, the inuring. We can blow up boats in the Mediterranean with no evidence, just trust. So what I’m saying is it’s so distracting because underneath, I think many of us feel a sense of despair. Despair for our democracy, despair for our families, a despair at times in our own body that leaves us with that sense of the reels on my phone through Instagram feel truer to give me life than memorizing Psalm 23. So we’re in this world where the question is how will you center? How will you hold core truths in a world that is more fundamentally postmodern in Machiavelli’s approach to creating chaos in order for there to be order, but the kind of order that really is at its fundamental core, despotic and authoritarian, and then not even notice? So one of the things that I’ve begun to do is to read in a realm I’ve hardly ever read: political theory. Back to reading a bit of Plato and the Republic, the fifth book, which is being utilized in our culture as a framework for thinking about the nature of how life should be lived. I’m just aware, I’m a fairly educated man, but in very narrow ways. I need to have a better understanding of the philosophical core that’s guiding the Trump administration, let alone any other administration. So being aware, being aware. Why am I watching 30 minutes of pointless evening news? When could be spent centering myself in worship, but also creating a context to go, I haven’t read Machiavelli since college. I haven’t read 1984 since high school.
Rachael: Yeah, I was going to say high school. It’s banned now. So you can’t read it. You can’t read it in a lot of places in school and public schools. But…
Dan: To say this isn’t just a philosophical search. This is, I need to understand my era. I need to understand what my body is suffering. And as much as we spend, and we will spend the majority of our focus on helping people engage trauma, we have to also know that despair will not be lifted without movement. And in that sense, for us having more time to worship, I think a second thing that we’ve begun to do is spend more time memorizing. We walk every 45 minutes every early morning, and Becky was the one who said, why don’t we begin to memorize scripture as we’re walking, as well as praying? And I’m like, I don’t think my mind can hold that. She said, well, that’s the whole point. Remember when you couldn’t remember the word quilt? And I’m like, yeah, where I had to say to her, what, okay, I need a word. It’s a cloth on the wall with other cloths on it. She’s like, quilt? Yeah. Alright, so I am distracted. I am aging. I need to get centered and I need to have something that holds the core of me in that sense scripture. But also do we understand the age we’re in?
Rachael: Yeah, I mean that’s part of what I said meant when I said sobriety, right? That’s a kind of sobriety to really understand the age that you’re in and the mechanisms of it. And yeah, I think that is for me where a lot of despair comes in because I’m a child of the eighties who really believed that we were on this kind of upward continuous trajectory of progress. And so I think to be in a reenactment, so to speak, because the platonic forms that our current government is saying we need to return to are all very explicitly White supremacist and patriarchal and ableist and very terrifying and very violent to anyone who doesn’t fit the perfect form. And they’re making that clear in policy, ideology and in this chaos. And so I think not only does it help us understand what’s going on, but I think it also informs how we love and how we move with a lot of intentionality and how we resist. And so I love that sense of, for me, part of the disrupting distraction I already mentioned is trying to eliminate some of the core distractors, or at least reduce my engagement, but also to start journaling again, which is something I haven’t done since college. And I think writing, I need to be writing and finding ways to articulate thought. And as a part of leaning into movement for me, because I think part of White supremacy culture that keeps us really bound is this sense of I have to do it all alone. And it’s like, no, I can’t take on everything. It’s too much. Maybe before I could dilute, I had dilution if I just worked hard enough just like I could save my family if we just worked hard enough, if we just got the right people in office, we can turn this thing around. And I think I’m becoming more Christian by the day in an orthodox way of like, no, what does it mean to follow Jesus? What does it mean to be filled with the spirit? What does it mean to lean into collective gifting? That I need to be faithful with my resources, all of them economic, intellectual, relational, to be generous in my located place and in the places I’ve been called to steward, joining a great collective of people who are doing that. And so for me, part of that is I need to be writing more and I hate writing. And that will be a discipline for me that requires well discipline, kind of just leaning in. But that is a form of movement that I would not think about as movement because obviously in addition to just moving my body, that is a very intentional movement that again, I feel the spirit saying, go deep. Go deep. And that might mean moving slow, and that feels counterintuitive when there’s so much urgency. And yet there is something about, and I’m kind of with you, there’s some scripture and some text that I want to meditate on pretty regularly and memorizing, I’m going to have to heal my little sword drill heart because I had to memorize scripture as a little one, but I kind of liked it and it was very competitive and I was very good at it. And some of those scriptures I still could recite to you just by sheer memorization. Also singing in choir with Psalty the Psalm book, which was singing scripture. So I get a little, there’s something with memorizing scripture that could get me a little like, ooh, and that meditating on certain texts that I think I just need to return to again and again and again. Because when you’re traumatized and fragmented, sometimes you need a constant refrain that grounds you and calls you back and doesn’t require you to have to be too much in your prefrontal cortex, but to soak something in and take something in. So I’m with you on that. I think that’s a really kind and simple, but kind of hard. We were talking, now you can recite the Lord’s Prayer, but do you remember what the actual stanzas are, like when to pause?
Dan: I mean, this is one of those aside moments of I’m so sorry that memorization was said in the context of competition and awards. I remember taking my oldest daughter when she was quite young to a particular group where I won’t name it, but just to say where particularly memorization was a very central part. And she came out of the first event. I remember we got into the car and she looked at me and she said, I will never go back. I’m like, why sweetheart? She began to describe something of what the evening had been in our church, and as she’s describing it, I’m like, oh, good God, I would never have survived. And she looked at me and she said, I’m willing to do a lot of what they invited me to think about doing. I’ll do it with you or mom or both, but this felt like, and I’m like, I don’t know how she even knew the word. She said, this feels like what I understood the brown shirts to be like in Nazi, Germany. And I’m like, oh, we’re talking about how even scripture can be brought into a level of power dynamics through competition to create comparison in a way in which it’s just the reinforcement of somehow the worst forms of envy and power. So to be able to go, we need to have a center. And what our culture, again, in the broadest sense wants is for us to succumb to a kind of division, distraction, despair that forces us, compels us to give up our sense of center our identity in the context of being a follower of Jesus. And in that fundamental, I want to follow Jesus this year. And I think there is, at least at the beginning, we can compare this to mid or the end of the year, but a sense of I’m not going to make it if there isn’t a deepening and sweetening of my union with Jesus, a greater capacity to hear the spirit and more freedom to be able to go, well, I mean we’re going to talk about narcissism this year depending on how far I read and reread 1984 and The Prince, we’re going to be talking about Machiavelli and how Machiavelli actually in so many ways was wittingly or unwittingly trying to survive de Medicis and the de Medicis were an absolutely dictatorial, violent, torturing, governmental structure. And again, I know this is a field, so I just got to do it quickly, but there’s a question as to whether the prince was written as almost a comedy of errors. Like this is what you’re doing, this is what you think should do to run a government. But actually underneath it is a way of disposing us of any thought that power is the general direction to be able to make a government work. And so what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus that ultimately in a culture that has already said, empathy, compassion and care has not worked and we’re at the gates of hell and we need to turn around our culture, we need to redeem America, and we’re going to do it through power and through chaos, and we’re going to do it through threat. We’re going to do it through all the mechanisms ultimately of diminishment of others in order to reclaim a Christian culture. So we’re just in a deep stew. I had other words, but deep stew. And in that process, I think I’m just speaking for you and me, we need more Jesus to be able to do this without being acerbic without in one sense, because I am not a follower of the left. I do not like the left, I don’t like the right, I don’t know what the center is, but I know that there must be a via media, and that’s often what theologians have called the middle way of Jesus to engage Ukraine, Gaza, our current assaults against Venezuela. As we think about the reality of how do we talk about the gospel and light of living well in a broken world, I can just tell you even this conversation feels very energizing to me.
Rachael: Well, and as we were talking, I was thinking about a conversation Michael and I had because at our wedding, we were dumb and naive and put Romans 12 in our program as a core grounding text for our family. I say dumb and naive because it sounded great at the time. Like, oh, and the world was a little different at the end of 2019. So it just felt like this will be great. This is a great way to orient our lives. And it’s increasingly becoming harder. And I think the trickiness of talking about the middle way can sound almost like there’s an escape from having to lean in to the world as it is that there’s an escape from suffering. But what we’re really saying is we don’t have to utilize the powers of this world, power, coercion, violence, degradation, shame, humiliation, fear, control, tactics that really are of abuse. But the reality is in order to follow the Jesus Way will mean likely to die. I was just like, I don’t know when I read that, that’s why I’m like, what were we thinking? Because when I think about parts of Romans 12 and this notion of love in action, Paul is saying, love must be sincere. Hate what is evil. Clinging to what is good, be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you. I don’t want to do it. Bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice, mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people who are vulnerable. Do not be conceited. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath. For it is written, it is mine to avenge. I repay as the Lord. On the contrary, if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirst to give him something to drink. In doing this, you’ll keep burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Dan: Well, we hadn’t planned on this, which is again, one of the sweet gifts of working with you, spontaneity. We’re going to blame on the Spirit. What we’re hoping for ourselves and for you all for this coming year. So I’ll come back to this phrase, it would be great if it’s a happy new Year, but may it be one in which our lives are more formed in Jesus than we were in the year 2025.