Ever get to the end of a day feeling empty, despite all the stuff you’ve checked off your to-do list? Ever wonder if you are pursuing accomplishment, productiveness, and efficiency at the cost of feeling truly alive?
If you feel more like a machine than a human being, maybe it’s time for you to find your way back.
We live in an era of unprecedented industrial conveniences and technological advances, yet these do not come without a cost. Our lives are more of a high-speed blur than ever. The tools we invented in order to free ourselves from labor have become our masters.
Just try to live without your cell phone for half a day.
So how do we respond to this kind of world? It’s hardly practical or desirable to disconnect, living in a cave somewhere off the grid. If we want to be part of society, this is what’s happening now.
We can accept it, but still be wise about it.
Recently, I watched a documentary about futurist Raymond Kurzweil, who believes human beings and machines will be blended into a singular entity by the year 2029. Kurzweil’s greatest hope lies in the notion that we will be able to download our brains onto computers, and thus ensure a kind of eternal life.
If that’s the best we could hope for, the outlook would be pretty bleak.
Around the time I watched the Kurzweil documentary, I was reading The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing our Brains. Author Nicholas Carr does not agree with Kurzweil’s predictions, but says we must be careful not to lose our humanity in light of ever-increasing technological advances and the rapid, addictive pace of life on line. One study Carr cites demonstrates something I intuitively knew was true:
Spending time in nature restores our ability to think deeply and clearly.
Nature. The created order. It’s not just poetic sentiment, it’s scientific fact. Spending time in a garden, on a beach, in a forest, somewhere surrounded by living, growing things – this is where we find soul restoration. It is here, with bare earth underfoot, twitter of birds, breeze caressing skin, we remember something primal.
We remember that we ourselves are created.
Creation heals. It serves to remind, drawing us back to our identity as divine image-bearers.Surrounded by the intricate beauty God has made, we remember our beginnings in a perfect garden. We take fresh hold of the promise of restoration. We hear the wolf’s howl, the elk’s bugle, the hawk’s keening cry as startling echoes of our own deep longing for the day the earth is made new.
You have a purpose as a human being, not as a mechanized part of a manmade production line. The very best thing you will ever fashion with your own hands, your most stellar efforts at creating, cannot be compared to the work of art God is making of you.
So spend some time in a park. Dig in a flower bed. Watch some ants. Feed the birds.
And remember who you are.
