One thing that really bugs me about this new digital culture is the way in which we limit ourselves emotionally by saturating ourselves with news…BAD news. Countless thousands of people will get up in the morning, brew their coffee, sit down at the computer and peruse the previous day’s tragedies. We’re hit all the time with news of death, war, famine, pestilence…yes, I’ve mentioned the four horsemen of the Apocalypse specifically (They’re Biblical, and not just icons of popular understanding). So much, in fact, that it destroys compassion and empathy. And this is frightening. We are deluged with so much loss and so much senselessness, and as a result we start to shut ourselves down emotionally, like circuit breakers. We can’t bear the things we hear on our own strength, so we don’t try. And that narrowing of the range of feelings short-changes the heart and soul of what we’ve been designed for. In a nutshell, what happens is that we’ve designed our lives to communicate in emoticons, which I call emotional shorthand.
There’s a lot of reference in the Bible to things like fullness of joy, and there are a lot of people who don’t experience it, because of depression (spiritual or physical), distraction, delusion and division. I kind of like the alliteration, and I’ll probably spend a post on these things a little later on. But now, bear one thing in mind – We’re not designed as emotionless beings. Nor are we meant to experience things like love and sorrow as brief blips on an otherwise steady ECG monitor. We have hearts for a reason, and it’s no accident that in places like Ezekiel 11:18-21 and Ezekiel 36:25-27 the Lord expressly declares that he will give us hearts of flesh. They are to be used for people, and to their full range…not as foolish little yellow heads to punctuate sentences.
Blessings;
Christ-bearer
