If you look at the blog archive bar on the right, you can see that I’ve been pretty consistent at writing a post twice a month. It’s not intentional. I guess it means I have about one deep thought every two weeks. The problem is, I haven’t written a single post this year, so my biweekly deep thoughts are piling up. I can’t decide which one to write about, so I figured I might as well leave it up to anyone who still reads this blog. I decided to post a few sentences, or whatever fragments I’ve already started to write on the topics I’ve been thinking about. I’ll add a poll as soon as I post this, so that you can tell me what you think you might want to read a full post of. Here are the options:
Independence
At 16 American teenagers gain the legal ability to drive unsupervised. 15 year olds look forward to their 16th birthdays impatiently, holding out a little while longer until they can go take a joy ride on their own, or meet their friends at the theater without being dropped off. You know that feeling of jangling keys in your pocket, that sound that reminds you you can walk to the parking lot and drive wherever you want.
Independence is a keyword in American culture, ever since we declared ourselves independent in 1776. That's often how we judge our success or value as people. When we realize that we rely on someone else to maintain our lifestyle, we tend to be disappointed with ourselves and frustrated with the people we depend on. Some people have a much harder time with dependency than others but for the most part , we like to see ourselves as self-sufficient. The incredible irony is that as we have progressed through modern history we have had a constantly increasing illusion of independence. Meanwhile, our lives have become increasingly reliant upon more and more people.
We cannot be independent from everything. If you really want to be as independent as possible, there are a few things you could try…
Legalism
I think the standard evangelical understanding of sin is disobedience to God’s commands. AWANA books say that sin is missing the mark. I don’t remember them explaining exactly what the mark is though. 1 Timothy 6:10 says that money is a root of all kinds of evils. So apparently some sins are foundational or branchlike where several specific sins stem from a category of sin which is in itself another sin. So maybe cheating is in fact a form of stealing. Maybe stealing is a manifestation of the love of money. So loving money is a sin that causes other sins. You’ve probably heard conversations about good sins and bad sins. I know I have. We see murder as a lot worse than coveting. But then we’re told that God sees them as the same. This confused me a lot. We can see the damage that murder does very clearly, we have a hard time seeing the damage that covetousness causes, and when we do it seems insignificant in comparison. Coveting might ruin a relationship, but murder destroys the person too….
Conflict Resolution
I’ve been involved in some conflict lately. I’m not going to go into much detail, but I want to mention two sentences that keep popping up in my head, thanks to my parents. They’re just some pieces of advice that each of them would give me whenever I had a fight or a disagreement with Andrew or Jenny or Liz. Usually when Andrew and I were trying to decide who got to sit in the front seat, my mom would say, “One of you has to be willing to give up your rights.” Whenever I talked to my dad about an argument or a fight, I would explain why the things I did were fine, and then tell him all the things the other person did wrong, and he would tell me, “You can’t change what ________ does. You can only change your behavior.” I really didn’t like either of those before, but now, I’m beginning to see just how good that advice was.
Determined People
Science is really good at explaining causes. Scientists look carefully at things that people see everyday to figure out what made them the way they are. As science progresses, we have explained more and more things. Most of the explanations science gives us are deterministic, or perfectly predictable. It means that if you know everything about a situation now, the exact state of things and all the factors that will influence it, you know exactly what it will be like in the future. The problem with that is that it’s not how we really think about the world. We think of the world as unpredictable, that there are an infinite number of possibilities lying between here and the future, and that we, and our thoughts and emotions and personality can influence the future. The frontier of physics right now is quantum mechanics. We’ve learned a lot about how things work on that level, but no one really understands what makes things work. We can tell what is likely going to happen, but we don’t know for sure. It doesn’t seem to be predictable. This means that science might have found the place where the mind, or will, or spirit affects physical outcomes.
So those are the options. I’ll also put some choices on there about things that I’ve been doing lately. Thanks for reading, don’t forget to vote.
