Tuesday, February 12, 2008

I am not a squirrel

Some kind soul at work today brought in a bag of sun flower seeds. The instructions read roughly this: "Put the seed in your mouth, crack the seed, eat the nut, spit out the sunflower seed. Advanced eaters will put many seeds in their mouth, put them on one side of their mouth, and then eat them, moving the empty seed husks to the other side of their mouth."

I can't even manage to properly crack the seeds with my mouth, let alone doing many seeds simultaneously. The seed and nuts cracks and splinters horribly on every attempt - I'm lucky my mouth doesn't have splinters. I've decided I'm definitely not part squirrel.

Meanwhile I've been contemplating the problem of reality. No, not that problem. This one: Stories are engaging because they develop themes in a short time. Whether it's a RPG computer game, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Troy (the movie), Dungeons & Dragons, or a camp fire, a story with epic theme(s) is told in a matter of hours. It's engaging, it's powerful, it's moving. Life, on the other hand, tends to grind along. The parts that are skipped over in a line or page in the stories aren't bypassed in life. And the themes often aren't visible until years - or decades - later. Often they won't be known until I'm dead.

So here's my thought: Escapism is very attractive. Given the choice between a pleasant but challenging evening doing chores or a few hours reading a novel, it's easy to choose the novel. It's just so hard to keep a biblical perspective about what God is doing day after day. It's great to talk about God redeeming us to be like him, or him working everything for our good, or helping others to know him. But in the middle of the 3rd load of laundry, the tenth hour after an untraceable computer bug, or the umpteenth wedding detail, I don't have much faith that I'm greatly -- or trivially -- advancing the kingdom of God.

I'm trying to figure out how to maintain perspective. Thus far, my primary discovery is that I don't do it very well.