FACING OUR CULTURE

We need to squarely face our culture. We need to ask where we find wisdom and encouragement to select and balance our time commitments. Realizing the peer pressure for children and adults to live less busily and more quietly is to realize that we will be radically different to social norms and cultural messages.

To live more slowly and find new values in a life less filled with noise, speed, and nanosecond stimulus is a major challenge for everyone. It will appear we are going backward, hiding from reality and to have our heads in the sand to even think such thoughts.

But the other thing to consider is the fruit that has been produced in us and our children after a generation or two of extreme busyness, multiple scheduling, all meals out and on the run, fast food and fast service, stress to time constraints, and with little attention to promoting, protecting and producing the diminishing skills of conversation, inquiry, softness, quietness, and peace. Peace cannot live in high-speed busyness. They are opposites.

“Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” Jesus