Month: June 2007

Of Godblogs & Gobbledygook

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As of this last month, I’m convinced that information overload is hurting our souls.

A common factoid spread around the blogosphere tells us that a single edition of the New York Times contains more information on its pages than the average person in the 17th century accumulated in a lifetime. Whether true or not, it doesn’t take a sociology degree to know that we’re bombarded with increasing amounts of data we must process daily. I think about the sheer amount of medical knowledge today and wonder how any doctor can possibly do his job without becoming irrelevant in only a couple years. Or consider how high-tech spawns and kills off new technology almost every day.

We don’t have to be doctors or IT specialists to know that the average person today must not only process local events, but happenings on the other side of the world. It’s not enough that a local teacher was killed in a car accident over the weekend, but a bus full of nuns holding babies in their arms went off a cliff in Outer Pradesh. It’s difficult enough to know the pain of our neighbors, but now the whole world is our neighborhood, and the newspaper screams the entire planet’s misery. Add in the Web, e-mail, TV, radio, and some new media yet to be produced, and you’ve created a litany of laments few rational adults can process.

Estimates vary widely, but some claim that publishers put out as many as 300,000 book titles last year alone, up from the year before, which was an increase over the year previous—and so it goes. Each book comes packed with information we must process, facts we must consider and digest. Data, data, data.

Many of those titles come from Christian publishing houses. Into that mix we add Christian magazines, music, curricula, television and even Bibles. And now we have the new phenomenon of the blogosphere, complete with its own Christianized blogs.

I used to skim through about 100 Christian blogs via Bloglines. I dropped that to about fifty. Now I’m down to about the same dozen. And I might need to trim even those.

I can’t speak for you, but I look at my own soul and see confusion. I can no longer process all the information hitting me daily. I cut my blog diet down simply because I’d come away from reading with an itchy scalp that required constant scratching. Too many opinions. Too many contrary facts. Too many discussions of esoteric theological minutia. Too many book reviews of too many “must-read” books guaranteed to make me a better servant of Christ.

But what I’m discovering, contrary to the pervasive wisdom of educating oneself, makes me wonder if this information deluge might be hindering the discipleship process God created rather than boosting it. One book tells me how to pray, but another claims that other book has it wrong. This blog here discusses the finer points of infralapsiarianism, with several blog participants yelling at each other. After a while, everyone is simultaneously right and wrong. I can’t possibly give any of it much deep thought. What I tend to do instead is build a wall around myself to keep the facts from demanding too much of me.

The restlessness many people feel in their souls may be due to an inability to handle this data deluge. I consider myself a fairly competent processor of info, but I can’t do it all anymore. When Paul tells Timothy to study in order to show himself to be an approved workman, I highly doubt he wrote of what you or I contend with daily. As the foremost book says:

Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
—Ecclesiastes 12:12b

Consider how many books the average person in Solomon’s day might encounter. There’s not a person reading this now who doesn’t own more books than a hundred households even a hundred years ago. Did Paul advise Timothy to sit down with a stack of systematic theologies? Was he advocating collecting the complete works of this rabbi or that and poring over them until their wisdom filled every nook and cranny of Tim’s noggin?

We know about Pavlov’s dog, but do we know about Seligman’s? That dog, placed in a wire pen, received an electric shock whenever a tone sounded. After a while, the dog sat helplessly whimpering in the corner of its cage on hearing the tone, even without the shock.

I believe that one reason the Christian Church in America continues to struggle with meeting the demands of the Kingdom comes from an overload of data, a sort of constant mental electroshock. Every time someone dumps another factoid on us, we run cowering to the corner, afraid of whatever inevitable damage must afflict us for the knowing. We live in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance that sends us begging for it all to stop.

People beg for it to stop in different ways. Some throw themselves into one source that they hope might stem the noise from other sources. Information overloadOthers go searching for even more info, without knowing they’re using more to keep from dealing with the consequences of truths they already grasp. Others simply go into a self-imposed shell. Some avoid anything that smacks of more information, but they don’t know how to ultimately turn off the noise, growing frustrated.

And it has become noise, hasn’t it? Even the genuine signal gets lost when it’s pumped up to ear-splitting volumes. In a world hellbent on getting this message or that through the noise, life’s volume knob comes preset at eleven.

Who can blame people for failing to respond? With all that shouting, even from Christian sources, who can tell what’s right? Better to not risk doing the wrong thing based on conflicting info than to look stupid. And who knows what’s right and what’s wrong with everyone shouting?

It seems unbelievable to think that buying one more Christian book to read might be the wrong thing to do, or that perusing a respected Godblog might be a hindrance to growth. Or consider that Sunday’s sermon might be yet one more set of commands we can’t possibly live up to simply because it must contend with all the other data we don’t have time for. Lately, when I look at all the input, I don’t have any other way to think of it.

Listening to too many voices, even when those voices are good, is still the sign of a schizophrenic life.

I don’t know that that means for Cerulean Sanctum. I don’t want to add to the turmoil. I don’t want this blog to join others in numbing people to the Gospel. Whenever life gets reduced to a anesthetized blur, all meaning is lost. God never intended for us to dwell in a perpetual state of information overload.

I’m thinking. What are you thinking?

All Sorts of Random Stuff

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Lots of things going on right now. Have a million post ideas in my head, but all sorts of other, more diminutive, thoughts keep prattling about in my mind. Perhaps if I get them down in writing, I can actually sleep at night.

If you like hodge-podges, this is it!

  • Read through Shaunti & Jeff Feldhaun’s two books, For Women Only and (shockingly) For Men Only. Pitched at married couples trying to understand each other, rather than going down the same, tired pop-psych route, they veered into Barna’s territory and polled men and women about what they thought the other sex was thinking. Nothing proved earth-shattering for me, but the accuracy of the comments really hit home. It’s nice to hear you’re not nuts. Given that these two books have quite a following, I suppose they smack of a revelation to some. My wife and I have had good discussions based on the books, and I plan on recommending them to the couples group we’re a part of. The books aren’t filled with tons of Scripture, but they make no pretenses toward that and would even feel a bit forced if they did. Call it common sense. Nice length, taut writing, and easy skim-ability make for two essential reads.


  • Date-Dabitur has nothing to do with the sexes and everything to do with a Christian agrarian lifestyle. My attempts to live the agrarian way look feeble compared with this blogger. Check out this compelling post, Garrison Keillor On Our Amish Future, then stick around and read some of the controversial, yet compelling, posts on this blog.


  • Julie R. Neidlinger’s Lone Prairie.net Blog contains the kind of writing that I can only aspire to here at Cerulean Sanctum. In her own Keillor-esque way, Julie captures life as an artist in North Dakota, meditating on a wide range of subjects—always with uncommon insight and wisdom. She deserves a following.


  • Just down the road to the west, someone drove a car through a house. A through and through. That’s the kind of thing that happens in the country. At the T-intersection just east of me, drunks think the road continues, but it dead ends in a soybean field. Meanwhile, the local newspaper ran yet another story on a crystal meth bust. I never saw so many burned out homes until I moved here. Between the meth labs and three-pack-a-day smokers falling asleep with a lit butt in their hands, it’s a wonder every other house isn’t a charred ruin. People think the country’s idyllic, but with all the work moving overseas, many people here lead lives of quiet desperation. Tim Keller says we should all move to the city in order to minister, but the city’s got nothing on the problems of the country.


  • On one of those days when it was run, run , run, my son and I ducked into the area Chik-Fil-A for lunch. To our surprise, in one corner of the restaurant, a pretty, young woman soloed on her violin. My son immediately bounded over to her and stood awestruck. A small sign near her case noted she’d been selected to play in an elite orchestra gathering in Beijing and was trying to raise money for her trip. I surveyed her receipts lying strewn in the case and topped the largest bill I saw there, not wishing to repeat the tragedy of a particular social experiment. We sat nearby and enjoyed her playing. At one point, I asked her about the Bell experiment and she expressed similar shock to mine. Over the course of time she played, we enjoyed every note, particularly her rendition of “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific. Thank you, Emma.


  • The Wall Street Journal ran a horrifying story about the chaos roiling those who took out sub-prime home loans. With the sub-prime mortgage industry collapsing, it’s taking down thousands upon thousands of homeowners with it. The chart the Journal ran of the increases in bankruptcies associated with sub-prime loans looked like the exhaust trail left by a Saturn V rocket. And I have to ask yet again, what are the churches these folks attend doing about it?


  • Now that I will actually have some time come fall to work on my novel without distractions, I read today that one of the elements of that novel, the search by particle physicists for the elusive Higgs Boson, has been rendered moot because those darned physicists may have found the dad-blamed thing. Supposedly, scientists claimed current accelerator technology didn’t have the horsepower to uncover the boson, but sadly for me, I guess it did. Tip for future novelists: write faster.


  • Over at the BHT, Bill MacKinnon wonders how his church can go beyond programs and actually witness to the lost. My suggestion? Love them. Be there for them when no one else is. Be their friends, but with no other expectations than friendship. Find out what they need and meet that need. Cry with them. Laugh with them. Invite them into our homes. Show them Jesus by being Jesus in their lives. That’s how you bring people jaded by talk into the Kingdom today.


  • Yes, I’m still waiting for updates to the WordPress widgets that power the sidebar of Cerulean Sanctum. I’ve dropped numerous hints to the guy who created them, but so far nothing. And thus we see the Achilles heel of open source software.


  • My satellite Internet provider decided that broadband is a nasty word and has instituted draconian bandwidth limitations. Considering that just one backup of this blog is a 120MB download, I’m hurtin’. I used to stream Internet radio for hours a couple years ago, so I don’t get this sudden policy shift. Let’s be honest: it’s a YouTube, VOIP, tabbed-browsing, iTunes world. I’ve been with them six years now, burned through four modems (*cough* JUNK *cough*), and paid countless thousands of dollars for their pricey service, and now comes a bandwidth limit. Right now, I’m throttled, so it takes about five minutes to open a page (if it opens at all). Note to StarBand: this is not how you please veteran customers.


  • Meanwhile, the Chinese government continues to imprison believers. What a spoiled brat that makes me when I beef about my ISP, huh?


  • Not that kind of prophet: looks like I missed on my oracle that gas would be $4 a gallon over the Memorial Day weekend. That’s one of those times when it’s good to be wrong. Still, we need to stop all futures speculation on energy. It makes a few people rich at the expense of the rest of us.


  • A reader noted my mood’s been all over the map this week. Actually, it’s been generally good lately, but we could always use more prayer. Prayers for prosperity and blessing are especially appreciated now.

Thanks for being a reader. As always, the comments are open.

Unless…

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Unless...My favorite Dr. Seuss book is The Lorax. The eponymous main character looks something like an angry groundhog with a walrus mustache. Claiming to speak for the mute trees, he stands in the gap when the story’s narrator, The Once-ler, rides into the pristine forest with profit on his mind. As the Once-ler has his way with the world, despoiling every last square inch of land, chopping down every tree, forcing the forest creatures out, only the Lorax remains to stand up to him.

Many years later, in relating the sad tale of the destruction of the last truffula tree to a boy, the chastened Once-ler speaks these haunting words:

The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance…
just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance…
as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants.

And I’ll never forget the grim look on his face
when he heisted himself and took leave of this place,
through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace.

And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks, with one word…
UNLESS.
Whatever that meant, well, I just couldn’t guess.

That was long, long ago. But each day since that day
I’ve sat here and worried and worried away.
Through the years, while my buildings
have fallen apart, I’ve worried about it
with all of my heart.

But now, says the Once-ler,
Now that you’re here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.

The lesson of The Lorax goes far beyond a simple environmental message. It reinforces a Biblical truth that today’s Church in America best heed—the reality of UNLESS.

UNLESS we Christians share the message of Christ with the lost, they’ll endure eternal punishment for all eternity.

UNLESS we feed the hungry, they’ll succumb to malnutrition.

UNLESS we fight for justice for the disenfranchised, they’ll continue to be exploited.

UNLESS we visit the prisoner, they’ll die in a prison of their own loneliness.

UNLESS we minister to the sick, they’ll get sicker and perish, forgotten.

UNLESS we show the world love, it’ll never know what true love is.

UNLESS….

We can fill in a thousand statements behind that UNLESS, can’t we? The job Christ left us to do is vast and not getting any less so. We are the Body of Christ—His hands, His feet. And UNLESS we do the work He’s called us to, it simply won’t get done.