I had a plan for this morning. It was a magnificent plan. I was going to sit down and produce a piece of writing so intellectually piercing and spiritually resonant that Glyn Barrett would stop mid-preach, look into the camera, and wonder aloud if I should be fast-tracked onto the AoG National Leadership Team.
I was going to write something Meaningful.

But I haven’t. And the reason I haven’t is that my Samsung phone is a pathological liar.

Now, I’m a Samsung man. Always have been. I’ve always felt that Apple caused quite enough damage in the Garden of Eden without us handing them £1,200 for the privilege of a proprietary charging cable. But my current handset has developed a peculiar, digital psychosis. It is convinced—utterly and unshakably—that I am currently in London.

Actually, it’s worse than that. It thinks I’m in Elephant and Castle. Why? I have no idea. I’m not even sure what an Elephant and Castle is. It sounds like a failed pub or a very confusing safari park, but my phone is insistent.

I, meanwhile, was looking out the car window at a cold, grey morning in Glasgow. I am surrounded by the kind of drizzle that doesn’t just fall; it colonises your soul.

I’m looking at the M8, a road that people claim is a motorway but is actually just a linear car park designed to test the patience of Job.

People say the M8 is your “mate.”

It isn’t.

It’s that toxic friend who invites you to a party and then strands you in a five-mile tailback near Charing Cross because someone’s radiator has exploded.

I’ve tried to reason with the Samsung. I’ve toggled the settings, performed a “soft reset,” and even held the device up to the window so it could see the distinct lack of a Cockney accent.

Nothing!

It just stares back with that smug, high-definition glow, insisting that I’m a ten-minute walk from the Imperial War Museum. It’s an act of digital colonialism – the algorithm has decided that if you aren’t within the sound of Bow Bells, you don’t actually exist.

However…

This digital displacement did get me thinking about the nature of Presence. As those who know my speaking will attest, I lean into the concept of presence like a man trying to find a solid handrail in a gale. And as I sat there, fuming at a GPS dot that was 400 miles off target, I realised we are living in the age of the “Perpetual Elsewhere.”

We have outsourced our sense of place to satellites that prioritise data centres over dirt.

We are physically located in our parishes, our studies, and our traffic jams, but our consciousness is consistently geotagged to a different “London”—a digital centre of gravity that demands our attention while ignoring our actual environment.

The Incarnation, after all, was the ultimate protest against being “elsewhere.” God didn’t send a localised ping from a celestial server; He showed up in the dust and the muck of a specific, provincial town.

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” (John 1:14, NKJV)

He was and is present. 

In a world where our technology is constantly trying to teleport our minds to the capital, perhaps the most radical pastoral act we can perform is simply to stay exactly where our feet are—even if those feet are currently stuck on a stationary motorway in the West End.

It’s a profound thought. A deep, ecclesiastical shift in perspective. It’s exactly the kind of "Meaningful" insight I set out to capture.

But it’s gone now. Because my Samsung has just buzzed to warn me that there’s "heavy traffic near the South Bank," and for some reason, I’m now genuinely stressed about being late for a meeting in SE1, while I’m actually sitting in a cold room in Glasgow, wondering where it all went wrong.

A reflection on presence, place, and faith in ordinary life.

If you liked this, you might also enjoy some of the other reflections gathered under Theology & Bible.

Other material can be found across the blog, including Window Seat, Creative Writing, and Policy & Public Life.