The most important thing I can do is set you free to hear and obey the Lord.
I was really surprised that a technology security guy addressed a topic so close to my heart. In historical church theology is the word “acedia.” It describes a kind of overwhelming sense of futility that once afflicted monks who spent too much time in isolation from the real world. Everything they once valued came into question, and they had insufficient guidance in facing that. The linked article goes on to discuss a thought experiment: What would be important to you if you were quite certain the world would not continue long after your death? How would such knowledge change your values and objectives in life?
It’s no different from the basic question students of Dispensationalism would ask themselves: What should you do, knowing the Lord could come back any day now? I can tell you I never liked the answers most of them came up with, because it still carried way too much baggage they never bothered to consider. It was always discussed in terms of effects, not process, the standard bias of Western minds.
The heart-led path of process over product answers that sense of futility better than anything else. It’s like the parable of the Lord of the household returning in the middle of the night: Let us be found faithfully doing what the Lord called us to do. It rests on the assurance that, while that mission is altogether likely to change as time goes by, we can always know what it is He requires of us. And it’s always in terms of obedience in the choice of path, not the destination. The destination will always be unseen.
The world around us is in massive flux. It’s not just the end of the USA, but this political collapse is just a small part of the death of Western Civilization. It’s being replaced by something only partly visible for now, as betokened by my term “the Networked Civilization.” We can see that part rising; we cannot see the actual soul of what the networked infrastructure is gestating. But we can turn back and see the soul of the West, and there is oddly one good thing that the succeeding civilization seems intent on destroying: human independent thinking.
Now, I realize that independent thinking in the population has always been a threat to the elite ruling class since we got kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Every civilization has also contained at least one thread of seeking to empower the individual in some way. I sense that the Networked Civilization is founded on faking that, at best. On the one hand, we’ve never had better access to information; on the other hand, it’s never been harder to make use of it. The kind of research and technology that squelches or misdirects genuine human curiosity has never been stronger. The Networked Civilization will have perfected this one thing tyrants have always sought.
Granted, a truly heart-led orientation can overcome this evil, but it makes a huge difference if the mind has been prepared well beforehand. For all my promotion of the heart-led way, I still would like to see genuine independent thinking in as many people as possible. In Western folks, I could expect at least some mythology of individualism to make room for understanding how God calls each of us uniquely into His Kingdom. With the rising of the Networked generations, that’s missing entirely. It has been replaced by something not just mythical, but totally empty of meaning. Thus, we should expect more and more that it will require the birth of a heart-led orientation first, and then independent thinking has to be learned entirely from scratch.
In other words, that path back to Eden is now far, far longer than it was before. In Christ, the one most significant change was that an awakened spiritual awareness comes as a gift in preparation for learning to understand His revelation, whereas before His advent, one pretty much had to learn revelation before the spiritual awakening. It still rested on whether or not you sensed a divine calling either way, but giving the Holy Spirit up front instead of later does open the door far wider. It’s a much more inviting prospect than it was in the Old Testament.
The task of setting people free is getting larger and more difficulty by the day.
