Diagnosis America III - Lack of Time

“Lord, I want you to touch my life…. But you have FIVE MINUTES.” We are a busy folk are we not? Why is that? E-mail, PDAs, high-speed Internet cable, DSL, cell phones, satellite phones, tivo, etc, etc. It’s either Fed-ex or UPS that’s moves at the “speed of business” since light speed isn’t fast enough anymore. All this technology was supposed to make our lives easier so the story goes. Then why am I so damn tired?

All this scheduling hardware as made us an overly scheduled people. Some I know have nearly every waking moment of their lives and especially their kid’s lives planned out to the second. There was a short-lived commercial to that effect not long ago for cell phone service I believe. I thought it was hilarious, but guess a majority of viewers didn’t as it quickly disappeared. Hit too close to home maybe and didn’t sell enough cell phones. The outline of it was something like this:

Arise
Shower
Breakfast, two eggs, toast, coffee, juice
Swim team practice
School
Drink Lunch (vitamin drink)
More school
School sport practice
Select Soccer (Baseball, Pee Wee Football, etc) League practice
TV Dinner
Talk to Family Members
Bed

It used military time to avoid confusion between night and day. Sound familiar? Our information and transportation mobility seems to have made life more urgent not more convenient, since everyone knows you can get done today with that new wireless connection what you used to get done by tomorrow. “Whaddaya mean ya gotta go home?!?! There’s a Starbucks in your neighborhood, right?” Before anyone accuses me of being a Luddite, let me axe youse a question. So how is your life now? Better or worse? At the end of every day, do you feel accomplished or just tired? Worn out? Needing a vacation at Cozumel. Takes awhile to fall asleep at night because you’re feeling like you need to work harder because something’s not quite right or missing in your life or in those you love? Are you more profitable than you were last year? Do you check in with what your kids are up to via cell phone or face to face? Did you know you can get GPS tracking service on their phones now so you can confirm their whereabouts by satellite data to see if they lied about where they told you they were? How much is technology a crutch rather than a service in your day-to-day hectic life?

I was thinking perhaps there is some sense in Luddism until I remembered Theodore Kaczynski was a prominent neo-Luddite. You remember him, right? Scraggly, unwashed hair, lived in a hut in Montana(?), blew people up. Check out this link to see the list of “Hutman’s” compatriots. No, Luddism isn’t the answer, part of the problem maybe, but not an answer. What’s missing in the schedule above? If you’re a regular reader of this site, the answer’s obvious by now. The Dark One is ingenious in how he uses the tools available to him to distract us from what’s truly important. Is technology distracting you from God or helping you to connect with Him?

Senyonga observed that if we Americans find we have too much on our plate, then the wise would remove some of the items. A good cure for obesity as well. There’s an internet joke hanging on my office wall about Dakota tribal wisdom in the same vein: “Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you find you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.” It goes on about other strategies to try with dead horses, all of them idiocy that lands awfully close.

Are you riding a dead horse? Just sniff a bit and you’ll be able to tell, but you’ll have to stop and stand still first so there’s no wind to blow away the smell. You can get a new horse at that building down the road. You know, the one with a cross on its roof? Some are big, some are small, but they all have a good stock of the same fresh horse.