Many people are depressed in the world today. I was for a few years as well. This was during the heart of the 2008 economic crisis. I was convinced the world would end soon.
But then I accepted that the world could end as we know it at anytime. I decided that I may not even decide to carry on because of the state it would be in. I decided to stop watching the news (outside of the technology world).
Things starting getting better emotionally for me from there. During the 2020 pandemic, I got a lot done. I was surprised by how mild the crisis was. I was expecting something like HIV or Ebola becoming airborne.
Most of us in America live in a bubble. We are basically the world’s royalty. We see celebrities as living in ridiculous wealth that they squander. We appear the same way to the majority of the world. Our problems actually mirror those of the royalty at any other time in history.
We should not be surprised by suffering. We should be happy when nothing particularly bad is happening to us. Boredom is actually a great sign of wealth and happiness.
I have not traveled much since I was in the military. This is a deliberate choice. I have a good idea of how cruel the world is. Ironically we treat animals worse in the United States.
We have stopped growing economically. We foolishly allowed the richest individuals to save money by using technology and becoming more efficient without compensating us. We let others do our dirty manufacturing work and even literally sent our garbage there.
But these nations in Asia, just like those in Europe, were not going to be happy making our toys, for much less than what we consider the poverty level in our country. This could have lasted longer, if we were not so obsessed with economic efficiency and at the cost of social resilience and stability in crisis.
Even when we do decide to care about the majority of the world we are too superficial, simplistic, and lazy to get a very detailed understanding of other cultures. When we start to treat people as individuals, then we will begin to turn things around in America. It should not discourage us to save only a few people, even in our entire lifetimes.
People are not an assembly line and do not respond well to another quick sales pitch. If you use the same techniques to win someone over for Christ that you do for selling technology, then you have lost most potential believers. This is even before they consider God’s offer of salvation.
We are really bad representatives of Christ. He could do all of this better than us. Which leads me to believe that winning people over is less about proving we are right and more about us demonstrating kindness.
The unique thing about Christ is not about His responses to the Pharisees. It is more about what He didn’t say. We rush into everything too quick.
We need to form relationships with unbelievers and be patient with them. God will give us enough time for them to be saved before they die. As followers of Christ, we do not get to set the rules.
We do not serve theology. Sometimes we spend so much time analyzing the Bible that we forget we are talking about real people. So soon we forget our own evil nature and when we were not saved either.
We lost a lot when we decided to throw away all the things about the traditional Church when Northern Europe and America became Protestant, independent, and wealthy. Individuality is worth pursuing, if we use it to inspire ourselves to be better people. Using it as an excuse, to put in less effort, or to give up is not helpful.
Maybe we can focus our efforts on what we consider the little things, in our own lives. We need not worry about politics or the state of the world. We need to find encouragement, when small things go right. Once we accept our limitations, we can find the joys God brings to our lives.
This century our world will learn humility one way or another. No matter how smart we think we are, we cannot out engineer the consequences of sin. Just because we lived in great comfort, early in our history, does not mean the same conditions are owed to us forever.