Godly Character

‘Tis a Gift to Communicate Simple: When Facts, Opinions, and Dismal News on the Internet Overwhelm the Soul

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Two friends of mine died recently, one a college friend and the other a high school friend and neighbor.

I last spoke to the high school friend at a reunion, and she blessed me immeasurably with comments she made about her conversion to Christ and what helped empower it. The college friend I knew from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and he was part of a special time in my own personal spiritual growth. I can’t recall whether it was through Facebook or LinkedIn that we reconnected, but we did drop a couple lines to each other over the last couple years.

The high school friend died of cancer, seemingly a victim of genetics, as her entire family is gone now, most claimed by that disease. The college friend, despite his close involvement with international students and his devotion to the Lord, took his own life and left a wife and teenage sons behind.

In the aftermath of those deaths, I was surprised by my own sadness for people I was once closer to, even though our connection had faded over the years like many do.

Something is happening to us as people. A malaise has swallowed so many. I go back to that “powerful delusion” referred to in Scripture, and I wonder if we are in the grip of it.

It may have something to do with how we communicate.

For many, Facebook has become the primary means of connecting to people. I would not have it that way by choice, but the majority have elected to live vicariously through the social media giant, and it is nearly impossible NOT to be on it if one wants any regular connection to others at all.

Internet, Facebook, sadness, and depressionBut in being on Facebook or LinkedIn or some other public Internet connection space, one hears nonstop from others of the demise of a dear pet, a mother’s progressively losing battle against dementia, a broken marriage, motorcycle accidents, sudden lack from financial misfortune, the latest horrific decision by the people who govern us, and the little personal doubts that plague human existence.

With all due respect to my two recently deceased friends, in an earlier age it is likely I would not have heard of their passing. Dare I say this? A mercy exists in that ignorance. I wonder if it is a mercy once given by God but now gone missing thanks to social media and Internet technology.

It’s not that I don’t want to know. We all want to know. We all want to feel a part of the human network. We all want to express our sympathies and get our chance to console, pray, and support.

But I wonder if it’s too much communication delivered by too sterile a means for us to incorporate into our being in a healthy way.

Women tend to be more connected than men are. In a given day, my Facebook wall consists more of female commentary than male, even though I probably know more men than I do women. I don’t think it is any coincidence then that women over 35 seem to be increasingly despondent or willing to act out. The number of people on psychoactive meds is skyrocketing, and women mostly are driving up those numbers. I wonder if the burden of personal communication delivered so impersonally through the Internet is proving too much for their psyches to bear.

This does not NOT affect men, though. I wonder if my college friend, who fought depression most of his life, found the waves of bad news assailing him so often and so easily to be fuel for his inner sadness.

As I have thought about this topic (which many readers will note I have explored in one way or another before), a study came in right as I decided to write this post. NPR commented: “Facebook Makes Us Sadder And Less Satisfied, Study Finds.”

While the gist of the study says Facebook creates an illusion that other people’s lives are better than ours, which leads to despondency, I think there is much more to it than that. I believe that for any good news we receive through the Internet, some people respond more powerfully to the bad news. When combined with the instant national and international news access we “enjoy” in an Internet age, all the trouble in the world comes right to our doorstep. Once it was merely CNN on the Internet telling us about mudslides in Peru, but now it’s that guy we lost track of in junior high school but who is now a Facebook friend telling us his wife was just diagnosed with MS. And that gal we met at a friend’s party Facebooking to tell us her home is being repossessed. And that guy who reads our blog posting the latest bad news out of D.C. Or that woman who is a friend of a Facebook friend who is compelled to send the latest proof that we are in the Last Days and we better watch out because it’s going to get worse and worse and worse and worse and…

The cure, says the NPR article, is to return to face-to-face communication.

I wonder if that’s a “stuff the genie back into the bottle” sort of pipedream, though. If anything, scheduling time for a face-to-face seems impossible, especially for anyone with children who have piano lessons, soccer games, 4H, Scouts, and a bazillion other activities to attend so they can be found worthy of acceptance into the best colleges and our efforts as parents will be vindicated.

I wonder if we have reached a time in human history where there is too much communication, and that in the wrong form, one which we were never meant to handle.

All the trouble in the world. And right there before us. 24/7/365.

I keep wondering how we pull back.

I don’t carry a cell phone. People are aghast when I say that. I get chucked into that “anachronistic weirdo” category people now have.

But now that no phone is NOT a smartphone plugged into an endless stream of human misery, when is there a time when we are free of bad/sad news? With a constant connection to other people’s heartbreak always within reach, to where do we flee?

The Catch-22 is that if we are not plugged into modern means of communication, how do we even arrange that rare face-to-face connection? You have to be in that social media loop if you want to connect at all.

Dropping out is its own little death. It’s consenting to social irrelevance, as if you once existed but no longer do. To opt out of social media is to become a face on a milk carton, relegated to the world of the mysteriously vanished.

The old Quaker/Shaker hymn is “‘Tis a Gift to Be Simple.” The follow-up line is “’tis a gift to be free.”

If we are to find a place of mental health as a society, I think that at some point we have to go back to simple. That NPR article claims that face-to-face is the only medicine for what ails us. Freedom from the digital communication onslaught is only found with communication of the old, old kind. The new kind seems only to be damaging us as people. We have to go back to the old ways.

But the cost of dropping out is that no one else may follow.

Now who will go first?

The Bible–Just Read It!

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I know I said I was overwhelmed with things to do, but I had to share this…

Was out tractoring on a pretty day and was pondering how people approach the Bible. I realized we have two major problems at work in the lives of Christians:

1. Too many Christians don’t read the Bible.
Ignorance of what is in the bedrock book of the Christian Faith is bad and getting worse. It seems like people are simply not reading the Bible well enough to know it. There’s not a problem today that isn’t touched on in the Bible. Knowing God starts with knowing His Word. We are a lesser people because of our ignorance of what’s in that book.

2. Too many Christians don’t read the Bible.
What these supposed scholars do instead is study it to pieces. Especially in the case of the New Testament, the books were letters. And who sits down to read a letter by parsing all its verb forms? In the end, the unity of that book and its simplicity go missing, and the studiers go off on each other, arguing silly points that would largely go away if they instead read the book like a letter, in its entirety, as it was intended.

People, read the book. And not piecemeal or with a Vine’s Expository Dictionary at your elbow. Just read it.

We now return Dan to his regularly scheduled blog-cation.

Dad Gone

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I read during lunch every day. This summer’s reading includes two very different books that, sadly, share one read-between-the-lines moral.

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough came to my attention from a Facebook friend posting that it was one of the books on Bill Gates’s reading list. As a father and as someone who majored in a field that deals with how people learn and succeed, I felt a duty to read this.

Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker is not the sort of book I typically read, but it has garnered considerable attention. The book examines the Long Island serial killer murders of women who sold sex via Craigslist.

The Tough book is something of a chain yank, since it focuses almost exclusively on how children in poverty can succeed. Featuring mini-profiles of poor children and their efforts to rise above a multi-generational trap of failure, it postulates a set of a traits these kids can pursue to improve their chances in life.

Meanwhile, the Kolker book’s profiles of the victims shows one way for girls in poorer families NOT to succeed: by turning to self-managed prostitution. Almost without exception, the lives of the young women in this book mirrored those of the Tough book, save that the victims here are all white.

What neither book really wants to come out and say is what is most disturbing about their similarities. How Children Succeed dances around this reality like a soldier trapped in a minefield, and Lost Girls (so far) reports just the facts, also avoiding the issue.

In both these books what is most obvious is the lack of a concerned, involved, stable father at home.

Dad and kidsAn endless stream of ne’er-do-well men drift in and out of the lives of the kids in How Children Succeed and Lost Girls. It’s so glaring and so routine that the authors’ failure to elaborate on it speaks volumes, especially in the Tough book, which I found particularly gutless in its unwillingness to state the obvious: that children succeed when they have a stable mom and dad at home. And in the Kolker book, knowing that most of these women started life with an absent father makes their ultimate life choices and demise all the more heartrending.

But this blog is not about poor children and murdered prostitutes.

I’ve written previously on Cerulean Sanctum that men in the Church have a greater responsibility than they assume. At a time when so many children are being raised by a mother alone, Christian men cannot cocoon within their own nuclear families. Men of all ages in the Church must understand that their responsibility to the next generation does not end with their own children.

If we are to make a positive impact on that next generation, Christian men need to make a concerted effort to be involved in the lives of other people’s children, especially those children who lack a father at home.

No doubt, this is a heavy task. We Christian men are overburdened as it is.

Still, if these two books depict the canary in the coal mine of our society, it’s that America cannot be great if its families are not great. And despite what the Left in America thinks, great families start with a solid, caring mom and dad at home.

If that is not possible, though, someone needs to step up to make it better than it is.

Church leaders, you know the families in your church that have a dad who has gone missing. You need to be more intentional about calling the men in your church, as a group, to do something about that lack.

Kids of all ages need strong, positive male role models. Both How Children Succeed and Lost Girls make this obvious, even if they are unwilling to say so.