Christian Living

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Easy doesn't do it. In fact, easy accomplishes precious little. Avoiding what's not easy has gotten us into trouble. We are living lives of distraction. We're not thinking things through. It's not easy to think--to stir the deep recesses of the mind. That's why we're sometimes surprised at the consequences of our actions: we didn't think them through. And there are whole industries dedicated to distracting us. Television, movies and computers spout trivia endlessly--non- information, useless for the most part, but entertaining and distracting. We don't even think through our waste of time watching and listening. We repeat and understand the "garbage in, garbage out" principle in relation to computers, etc., but its relevance to our minds, the original and most important computers of all, seems to escape us. There simply isn't any time in our lives to think deeply about anything. Besides, it's too painful!

Muscles not used for long periods of time move slowly and painfully. That commonly-held theory that we use only ten percent of our brain capacity has probably dwindled to one percent if it's true that what isn't used is lost. The basic problem with our educational system is that brains are not systematically pressed into use. If it's hard, forget it.

This is certainly not the fault solely of this generation--we have simply drifted toward making things easy, physically, mentally and every other way. But the brain got caught in the trap.
It takes energy to think, and it's neither necessarily fun nor easy. And about the only thinking energy that we are willing to expend has as its goal the accumulation of this world's goods. Meditation on reasons why, foundation principles and eternal verities gets lostin the shuffle, and we find ourselves with beautiful elaborate structures with no foundations which, with stress, eventually and inevitably come tumbling down.

We need to pick ourselves up and turn ourselves around toward seeking a basic value system, the result of carefully thinking through the deep issues of life, even if it's hard. Then economics will fall into place where it belongs--which is not first. We have laughed to scorn the philosophical voices among us that call us to a better, if not an easier way. But they may have the last laugh down through the corridors of time, for we may ease ourselves into oblivion.

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