Rachel Apa, age twenty-four, ran in this year’s New York City Marathon for the first time. She was raising money for Parkinson’s disease in honor of her grandfather, who had the disease and died in 2002. She played Division I field hockey at Bucknell University and was in “perfect health,” according to her father.
Then, two miles from the finish line, she collapsed. Her father said she was stricken with rhabdomyolysis, a rare condition in which muscles can break down during exertion, poisoning the body. CPR was administered by a bystander and later by event medical staff. Paramedics took her to the Mount Sinai Medical Center, where doctors tried for several hours to save her before she died.
“It’s unfathomable,” her father told reporters.
“Our cognition of the world became linear”
In The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet, journalist and professor Jeff Jarvis notes that with the invention of printing, “Our cognition of the world became linear.” He quotes philosopher Marshall McLuhan: “The line, the continuum—this sentence is a prime example—became the organizing principle of life.”
Jarvis explains:
Text evolved to become fixed, unchangeable, permanent. Eventually, texts were identical, consistent, no longer subject to the idiosyncratic edits, amendments, whims, and errors of scribes. That is how print gained trust. Society gravitated from collective credibility to that of the certified expert, honoring the graduate, the professor, the published writer. Print gave birth to the author as authority.
In such a world, the world makes linear sense. In English, each word is followed by the next, which is followed by the next. (Not all languages are so ordered; in German, for example, verbs often come at the end of the sentence.) This imposition of order leads us to expect our experience to be as ordered as the printed language we use to describe it.
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Then something unpredictable happens, and we realize how unpredictable our lives truly are:
- Multiple flights in Europe made emergency landings today after being diverted because of bomb threats.
- A small jet crashed and exploded Sunday in South Florida, killing nine people.
- At least 124 people were shot in Halloween weekend violence.
- One deputy died and another is on life support at this writing after a firefight with a suspect in Washington state.
Tuesday’s “blue wave” midterm elections illustrate the political frustrations and uncertainty of our times. In 1998, according to Gallup, nearly 70 percent of voters thought their congressional representative deserved another term, and nearly 60 percent said the same for most members of Congress. Now, “for the first time in a final pre-midterm reading, less than half of voters (43 percent) think their own representative deserves another term, while 15 percent say the same for most members of Congress.”
“You have the words of eternal life”
We can respond to the challenges of our day by “prepping for the apocalypse,” as Dr. Ryan Denison’s latest Focus article notes. We can try novel longevity therapies such as cryotherapy and hyperbaric chambers. We can hope that political changes will bring the changes for which we hope.
But you and I know that human attempts to reverse the Fall are as unlikely to succeed in our generation as they were for our parents and their parents. It’s not our fault; as Frederick Buechner observed, “What we know about reality through the five senses is roughly the equivalent of what an ant crawling across the front page of the New York Times knows about the state of the world.”
The simple truth is that we were made to need the agency of the One who made us. Houses cannot build themselves. The electricity that powers our homes doesn’t just happen. Nor can finite, time-bound people see the future or adequately prepare for it in the present.
This is why, when David faced bitter opposition from the people he led, he “strengthened himself in the Lord his God” (1 Samuel 30:6). It is why Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). It is why Paul testified at the end of his life, “I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to protect what I have entrusted to him until that day” (2 Timothy 1:12 NASB).
“If the Church does not recapture its prophetic zeal”
When our faith is just one part of our lives and religion is our hobby, our culture changes us more than we change it. Charles Spurgeon lamented, “I believe that one reason why the church of God at this present moment has so little influence over the world is because the world has so much influence over the church.”
By contrast, William Wilberforce (1759–1833), the political force behind the abolition of slavery in England, was convinced that the power of God operating through the people of God could transform any nation:
Is it not the great end of religion, and, in particular, the glory of Christianity, to extinguish the malignant passions; to curb the violence, to control the appetites, and to smooth the asperities of man; to make us compassionate and kind, and forgiving one to another; to make us good husbands, good fathers, good friends; and to render us active and useful in the discharge of the relative social and civic duties?
What was true then is true today, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. explained:
The Church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the Church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.
Changed people change the world. When we place our hope in Christ and submit our lives to the power of his indwelling Spirit, we become the change we need to see.
Will you be “the conscience of the state” today?
Quote for the day:
“Beware of harking back to what you once were when God wants you to be something you have never been.” —Oswald Chambers
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