When I was a kid, I remember having days in the summer when there was NOTHING to do. I was so bored, that I ALMOST longed for school to start. Life, even in the big city that I lived in was slow enough that I could find nothing to keep me occupied. Today, we have a much different environment filled with entertainment from literally hundred of TV stations, internet that seems to stretch to infinity, and a news media that keeps our head spinning with an ever accelerating array of world events. We can’t even keep up with everything that is out there.
I remember watching a demonstration in high school physics class of what happens when you spin a dish (we used a hubcap – something no one even knows about these days!) and watch its spinning orbit decay in a predictable manner. As it slowed its whizzing high-speed rotation it would at some point quickly develop a wildly erratic wobble before it suddenly and totally collapsed.
Do you see the possible parallel here? Everything in our world is going faster. Technology changes are evolving in hyper-speed. You barely have an Ipad 2 when the Ipad 4 is announced. Wars and civil unrest are spanning most of the globe. Terrorists are blowing up innocent children. Debts of whole countries, including our own are expanding exponentially. Population growth of the world is off the chart at 7 billion or more.
Faster, bigger, louder all over the globe…until the we run the train off the rails (or as we railroaders actually say… “we put it on the ground.”) I still see the hubcap I spun as a kid. I think we are approaching the first wobble of that decaying spin. Jesus said no man knows when the end of this era of mankind will come, and I certainly am not here to prognosticate like the loonies do. But it does seem that we are headed in a negative direction. One of the things that highlights my thoughts on this is the fact that depression is now the third-most frequent disease in the world…and predicted to be the most frequent disease in another ten or fifteen years at the rate it is growing. Can there be a connection? Is what we have become as a society affecting us that much?
A recent World Health Organization study found that regular attendance at religious services offered “significant protection” against depression (about 80 percent of the religious practitioners were Christians in the study, by the way.) People who never attended had the highest incidence of depression. Those who identified themselves as “spiritual but not religious” derived no health benefit, and those who attended more frequently had less depression than those who attended less frequently. None of this surprises me. God gives us hope in the death of Christ as atonement for our sins and His guarantee of our acceptance by Him now, and when we die. Frankly, it matters little if the world is spinning out of control and falling apart…we all will die someday. Where will you spend eternity? What comfort and calm depressionless hope will you possess as you move toward that final day of your life?
The hubcap eventually falls silently on the ground. You don’t have to.
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