If the internet network goes down, or worse, your phone network goes down, it seems as if life has stopped, or at least life has been put on pause.

Less serious but still annoying is when the network speed is just crawling along. That is when the bandwidth is somehow

being throttled back. Presuming the speed is zero, that the network is down, what can you do?

You're cut off. Your social network is down, therefore your social life is over.

College age students look at their phones and average somewhere between 74 and 150 times a day.

And why there's that variation depends upon the year of the study.

If there's no way for you to access that phone and get to the rest of the world between

75 and 150 times a day, you're just an isolated monad in a strange world.

And that is a serious limitation to one's well-being.

Whether the quality of all these communications is good or bad, people can and should debate.

But whether one communicates via text message emoji or an Instagram comment,

or whether one sees a friend in the flesh and gives a nice fleshly smile,

these communication patterns testify to our social character as human beings. And the hardware breakdowns testify to the reality of social

breakdowns. If those social breakdowns are harmful and have been caused by our own choices, our own fault,

we call them sins.

Sin attacks the flourishing of our social networks.

God himself is a communion of three divine persons, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

God created us so that we could be in a communion with his communion,

and so that there could be a communion with the angels and saints, the communion of Christ's church.

Serious sin cuts off these bonds.

It deadens the conversation that should be happening over our spiritual network.

Sin wounds others, but it also wounds ourselves.

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