62 | Are You Scrolling Past Easter? A Holy Week Invitation to Put Down Your Phone, Pick Up the Cross and Fix Your Eyes on Jesus

A few years ago, I turned onto a narrow cobblestone street in the old city of Jerusalem and stopped. The sign on the stone wall ahead of me read Via Dolorosa. The Way of Suffering. The road Jesus walked on His way to the cross.

Something in me expected the street to feel set apart, hushed, and separate from the surrounding world. What I found instead was noise, movement, and the completely ordinary press of human life. Vendors called from market stalls. Tourists moved through in clusters, many of them glancing at their phones. Locals made their way through the crowd with groceries in hand, conversations already mid-sentence, their ordinary day simply continuing around them.

This Easter devotional begins on that street, because what struck me there has never quite left me. The most significant event in human history unfolded in the middle of all that noise, and most of the people on that road walked right past the Son of God without truly seeing Him.

The distraction that happened on the Via Dolorosa was not born from cruelty. It came from noise, busyness, familiarity, and the relentless press of ordinary life. That description sounds remarkably current, doesn’t it?

The Lent You Planned and the One You Actually Lived

Many of us arrived at Holy Week a little out of breath.

Lent is designed to be a season of preparation, a time of slowing down and creating intentional space to draw near to God. For centuries, Christians have observed it as a way to enter more deeply into the story of Jesus before Easter Sunday. Most of us probably began with real intention. Perhaps you gave something up, committed to a reading plan, or decided this year would be different, more focused, more present, more meaningful.

Then life kept moving. Work grew demanding. The calendar filled in ways you didn’t predict. The weeks passed faster than expected. If the quiet, reflective Lent you imagined is not the one you actually experienced, the first thing I want to offer you, before anything else, is this.

Jesus is not standing at the end of Lent with a checklist. He meets you where you are. He has always met you exactly there. His invitation in Matthew 11:28 is not reserved for those with their spiritual disciplines perfectly in order. “Come to me,” He says, “all who are weary and burdened.” Not all who showed up for every Lenten practice. Not all who arrived prepared. All who are weary. Who are carrying something heavy. All who are distracted and in need of rest for their souls.

Come as you are. Come out of breath if that’s how you’ve arrived. It is not too late. We are still on the road, and there is still time to stop and truly see where we are.

The Disciples Had the Same Struggle

Here is something that has always both comforted and challenged me about the Easter story.

The disciples were physically present for everything. They had walked with Jesus for three years, witnessed His miracles, and heard Him speak about His death and resurrection more than once. By every measure, they had every possible advantage when it came to understanding what was unfolding around them.

Still, in those critical hours, their attention failed.

Consider the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus goes to pray on the night He is betrayed and asks His closest friends, Peter, James, and John, to stay awake and keep watch. He is in the most anguished moment of His earthly life, praying with such intensity that Luke records He sweat drops of blood, asking His Father if there is any other way. The people who love Him most fall asleep. Not once, but three times.

We shouldn’t be too hard on the disciples for this. They were exhausted, carrying the weight of an emotionally and spiritually overwhelming week. Sleep is a very human response to overwhelm. Even so, there is something quietly heartbreaking about the image. Jesus was in agony just a few feet away, and the people closest to Him were somewhere else entirely.

Then there is Peter, who swings to the opposite extreme. When the soldiers arrive to arrest Jesus, Peter doesn’t sleep through it. Instead, he reaches for his sword and cuts off a man’s ear. He is awake, but reactive. Present in body, yet responding from fear and impulse rather than understanding.

Their experience in those hours is deeply relatable. They were distracted by exhaustion, grief, fear, and confusion. They were there, and yet, in a very real sense, somewhere else at the same time. That is a profoundly human thing.

The Battle You May Not Know You’re In

What those hours in Gethsemane also reveal is a spiritual reality that most of us don’t think about nearly enough. There is a battle underway, and it is a battle over your attention.

If attention is the doorway to everything that matters, to relationship, to growth, to love, and to transformation, then it makes sense that it would be fiercely contested. It makes sense that there would be a fight over where we fix our eyes and what we allow to hold our gaze.

Hebrews 12:2 gives us one of the most direct instructions in all of Scripture: fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. Not glancing at Jesus. Not occasionally checking in between other distractions. Fixing, which implies an active, sustained, and intentional choice to keep looking in one direction even when everything around you is pulling your gaze somewhere else.

That instruction lands with particular weight in our current moment. The devices in our pockets are engineered specifically to capture and hold our attention. The platforms we use are built to trigger dopamine responses that make it genuinely difficult to look away. Mindless scrolling is not simply a bad habit. It is a deeply grooved neurological pattern that our phones are intentionally designed to reinforce.

Whatever form distraction takes, whether it is a phone, anxiety, exhaustion, or the relentless noise of a full life, the effect is the same. It causes us to walk the Via Dolorosa without understanding where we are. The cross of Jesus deserves more than a passing glance.

A Holy Week Invitation Worth Accepting

So here is a simple and specific invitation for the days between now and Easter Sunday.

Read the story. Not a devotional about the story, not a podcast discussing the story, but the actual account in Scripture. If you’re unsure where to begin, start with Luke 19 or John 13. Luke writes with remarkable detail and compassion. John writes with an intimacy that draws you in like nothing else. Both will carry you from Palm Sunday all the way to the empty tomb.

Follow the Story Forward, One Step at a Time

Palm Sunday, when the crowds waved branches and welcomed a king most of them didn’t yet fully understand. The Last Supper, where Jesus sat at a table with the people He loved and broke bread, telling them this bread is His body and this cup is His blood. The garden, the arrest, the trials, and the denial. Good Friday, when the sky went dark and the curtain in the temple tore from top to bottom, not from the bottom up, but from the top down, as though God Himself reached in and tore it open. Then Holy Saturday, the silence of a sealed tomb that the entire world believed was the end of the story.

Don’t rush past Good Friday to get to the resurrection. Let yourself sit in the weight of it for a moment. The journey to Sunday matters, and it is worth taking your time on the road.

What Needs to Be Buried Before Sunday

The story does not end at the cross.

It is worth saying twice: the story does not end at the cross.

Easter Sunday is coming, and with it, the most world-altering reversal in all of history. The tomb is empty. He is risen. Everything that death and darkness tried to hold permanently in place is completely undone.

Resurrection is not simply a historical event. It is a pattern that God has been writing into creation from the very beginning. Death giving way to life. Winter yielding to spring. The seed that falls into the ground and seems to disappear completely before it becomes something entirely new.

Romans 8:11 tells us that the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead lives in us. That is resurrection power, and it is not reserved for the first Easter Sunday. It is available to you today, as a real and living reality.

So as you move toward Sunday, consider honestly what needs to be buried so that something new can grow. What habits or patterns have slowly taken up space that was meant for something better? For many of us, phones have a way of filling every quiet moment before we even realize what is happening. That pattern, left unchecked, crowds out the very peace and presence that resurrection life makes possible.

The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is available to you as a follower of Christ. That is not a metaphor. It is your inheritance.

Pay Attention

On that cobblestone street in Jerusalem, most people kept walking. They were distracted by ordinary things, the very same things that pull at us today. Life, noise, their own needs and worries and plans pressing in from every direction.

But some people stopped. Some people truly saw. There were women who followed Jesus all the way to Golgotha. Simon, pulled from the crowd to carry the cross, who never forgot it. There was a Roman soldier who watched Jesus die and said, “Surely this was the Son of God.”

They paid attention. It changed everything for them.

My prayer for you this week is that you would be one of the people who stops and sees. No matter how full this week becomes, may you find even one small moment to fix your eyes on Jesus. Walk that road with Him slowly and with intention. Let the cross be more than a symbol you pass on your way to Sunday.

You cannot truly fix your eyes on the risen Christ and remain unchanged. Jesus is not a symbol frozen in time. He is alive. He is risen and he is for you.

Go into this week with that truth settled in your heart.

Digital Habit Reset

If something in this Easter devotional stirred something in you about beginning a relationship with Jesus, I would genuinely love to hear from you. Reach out directly at hello@julianneaugust.com. That conversation matters.

For those of you who are ready to release the digital habits that have been crowding out the quiet, the free 30-Day Digital Habit Reset is a practical starting point for that work. Download it free at julianneaugust.com

What is a good Easter devotional to read during Holy Week?

The most powerful Easter devotional you can engage with is the Gospel accounts themselves. Luke 19 through 24 and John 13 through 21 walk you through the full account of Holy Week, from the triumphal entry to the resurrection. Reading one section each day slowly and without rushing is one of the most meaningful ways to enter into the significance of Easter.

How can I reduce mindless scrolling during Holy Week?

One of the most practical steps is to create phone-free windows during the days leading up to Easter. Consider setting your phone aside for the first 30 minutes of your morning and replacing that time with a few chapters from one of the Gospels. Small, consistent boundaries tend to have a greater cumulative effect than a single large digital detox attempt.

What does fixing your eyes on Jesus mean practically?

The phrase comes from Hebrews 12:2 and describes an active, sustained focus on Jesus rather than the many distractions competing for our attention. Practically, it might mean setting your phone aside during morning prayer, choosing to read the Easter story in Scripture rather than scrolling, or simply pausing during Holy Week to ask where your attention has been resting and gently redirecting it toward Christ.