“The cross or the machine. It’s always the same choice.” – Marcus Mumford, “Conversation with my Son”

That line has been haunting me since the end of February, when I first heard Prizefighter, the latest album from Mumford & Sons. So much richness in a few words.

I am not going to review the album, though it is my favorite of 2026 so far. I’ve been drinking in the richness of their imagery, their call to action and pondering my response. But that one line haunts me more than the rest.

We make choices daily. When to get up, what to wear, what to eat for breakfast, and the list goes on. Thousands of daily micro choices.

But how often to we confront the big ones? And what do those mean for the rest of our lives?

I have spent a lot of time pondering the works of the late French sociologist Jacques Ellul. His writings on technology, published in the early 1950s, resonate today. He saw social media coming and warned against it in 1954, long before Mark Zuckerberg was born. You could say his entire work, probably 40 volumes or so, was a call to be authentically human in the face of the dehumanization that comes with technology.

Our lives, as Marcus Mumford reminds us, come down to a simple choice: The cross or the machine. Technology wants to eat us alive, but we are too numb, too dazzled by newness, to realize it. What was once servant aspires to be master.

Each of us has a choice. We can’t get rid of technology completely. But we can choose who is to be master and who is to be servant. The machine shouldn’t make the choice for us.

We can control how we interact with technology. It starts with being aware. It starts with understanding just what the choice is, the humanity exemplified by the cross of Jesus (I’ll skip the theological treatise here – ask me if you are interested.)

Ask yourself: What can I do to build community? What can I do to reduce my interaction with technology and increase my time making human connections?

That is a hard challenge for me. As an introvert I sometimes prefer the company of machines. People are messy. Emotions are complicated.

There is no doubt though which is healthier. Understanding that, I am working on it, as uncomfortable as it sometimes makes me.

What is your choice today: the cross or the machine? .And why?