After an introduction describing what it means to be resolved for 2011, I’m sharing a few of my commitments for the new year. They are for the most part mundane – many are not even what you might call “spiritual.” They are simply changes I resolve to make so that, by God’s empowering grace, I might become a more faithful disciple, husband, father, friend, and pastor. Read commitments #1 here and #2 here.
You know the trajectory of our world as well as I do: always moving toward consumption and speed. Perhaps today the options are wider and the pace faster, but it’s nothing new. The Apostle John described the world in a similar way:
Do not love the world or the things in the world…For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. (1 Jn 2:15-17)
There’s tremendous insight into the way of the world – even our modern world – in this ancient text. The term “world” is used in a variety of ways in Scripture. Here John is describing a culture – the systems and values of a people – that is anti-God. And he is able to boil it down to just 3 things: desires of the flesh, desires of the eyes, and pride in possessions.
Everywhere we turn is a temptation to our flesh: get your fill of food and porn and prescription meds, along with temptations to our eyes: this diet will make you beautiful, that car means you’re an urban hipster, this product will “change everything.” We are constantly poked and prodded from all sides to consume more and more, all in an effort to satiate our flesh and our eyes. And once we’ve consumed, we boast. We proudly display our new boat, our new Blackberry, our new breasts.
Such is the way of the world: Crave, Consume, Gloat. Repeat.
But this world as we know it is passing away. One day it will be gone for good, and everyday it is falling apart a little bit more. The lies we believe about what truly satisfies can’t stay hidden forever. The flash and sizzle of the newest thing wears off quickly, so our efforts to maintain the high must continually speed up. We need a new package to arrive at our doorstep each day, new people to “friend” us, more content to consume, more gadgets to keep us connected.
The digital age offers us new avenues to consume and gloat. William Powers writes in Hamlet’s Blackberry:
Because we’re always connected, the digital world offers us the constant confirmation that, yes, you do indeed exist and matter. But it doesn’t last. The validation we get from showing up in a Google search, being re-tweeted, or having a large number of “friends” isn’t very trustworthy or stable. It’s certainly not long lasting. So we’re forced to go back again and again for affirmation. Who dropped my name? Who’s read my post? Who’s paying attention to me now?
Powers continues, “We’re losing something of great value, a way of thinking and moving through time that can be summed up in a single word: depth. Depth of thought and feeling, depth in our relationships, our work and everything we do. Since depth is what makes life fulfilling and meaningful, it’s astounding that we’re allowing this to happen.”
One of the greatest threats to depth are screens – the various gadgets that glow and supposedly keep us “connected.” Powers again, “The more we connect, the more our thoughts lean outward. There’s preoccupation with what’s going on “out there” in the bustling otherworld, rather than “in here” with yourself and those right around you…We’ve effectively been living by a philosophy, albeit an unconscious one. It holds that 1) connecting via screens is good, and 2) the more you connect, the better. Few of us have decided this is a wise approach to life, but let’s face it, this is how we’ve been living.”
In the book In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed, Carl Honore describes the problem this way:
In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts. Boredom – the word itself hardly existed 150 years ago – is a modern invention. Remove all stimulation, and we fidget, panic, and look for something, anything, to do to make use of the time.
The problem is that our love of speed, our obsession with doing more and more in less and less time, has gone too far; it has turned into an addiction, a kind of idolatry. Even when speed starts to backfire, we invoke the go-faster gospel. Falling behind at work? Get a quicker internet connection. No time for that novel you got at Christmas? Learn to speed-read. Diet not working? Try liposuction. Too busy to cook? Buy a microwave. And yet some things cannot, should not, be sped up. They take time; they need slowness. When you accelerate things that should not be accelerated, when you forget how to slow down, there is a price to pay.
Indeed there is. We are losing our ability to truly rest, to carry on a conversation, to focus on the words of our Creator. The cult of connectedness and consumption most of us have joined is a sham. The gospel is better. The gospel bids us come and die to the constant need for affirmation we seek online. The gospel calls us to intertwine our lives with those right in front of us – in our local church – and for most that means investing in a handful of truly deep, meaningful friendships instead of skimming the surface of 200 “friends” and calling it community. The gospel compels us, as Nietzsche called it, to “a long obedience in the same direction” – faithful plodding over the course of a lifetime – a life Jesus described with images of the single, the small, and the quiet, which have effects far in excess of their appearance: salt, leaven, seed. In a culture that prizes the big, the fast, and the noisy, a disciple of Jesus looks for life in the small, the slow, and the quiet; even in the foolish, the weak, and the despised (1 Corinthians 1:26-28).
A pastor, more than anyone else, must embody this. Perhaps the best person on the topic is pastor Eugene Peterson, who writes in The Contemplative Pastor, “Pastors are in great danger of being undetected carriers of the very disease we are charged to diagnose and heal… Impatience, the refusal to endure, is to pastoral character what strip mining is to the land – a greedy rape of what can be gotten at the least cost and then abandonment in search of another place to loot.”
God forbid that I be a pastor who is always busy, who runs at a frantic pace, who is always connected, who “runs a church.” Peterson has encouraged me to see that “pastoral work is that aspect of Christian ministry that specializes in the ordinary.” As a disciple, a husband, a father, and a pastor, while everyone around runs toward consumption and speed, I want to faithfully journey toward simplicity and slowness – with my wife, kids, and friends in tow.
It’s alright to be people. Ordinary people. Slow down. Rest. You don’t need to be connected at all times. You can’t have as many true friends as you think anyway. Life lived through screens is just not as glorious as holding hands with your wife or lying in grass and gazing at clouds with your children. Scrolling through a list of status updates can’t hold a candle to sitting across from a real person and looking at them – really looking at them – as you listen to a story. It’s no badge of honor to always be busy. It’s alright if you don’t change the world. May we take the time to slow down, do just a few things well, live intentionally, and truly share it with a few others.
I’m learning that the need to connect, consume, and stay busy is simply me loving myself more than I love others. If my deepest desires include staying up to date, having the latest thing, crossing every item off my to-do list, who am I really serving? If it’s true that “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7), then God help me slow down and simplify so that I have both the time and the space to bear the burdens of other human beings, to dwell on the majesty of Jesus’ gospel, to renew my hope each morning in the cross and the resurrection, and to endure in faith over the long haul. God help me.
