There are patterns of thought that come as natural to us as our daily routines. These patterns of thought emerge from constructs and experiences that color and shape the way in which we view the world and they can emerge in the most unexpected ways. Sometimes we simply repeat what we have heard. Mindless phrases spill out of our mouths forming the patterns of response—even when the response is incongruent with the situation. “It is what it is,” we say, when compassionate silence is called for or “Everything has a reason” when faced with inexplicable chaos.

I recognize in my own life how these patterns of thought belie my true way of viewing the world, much to my chagrin. Oftentimes, they reveal callousness to the suffering of others. I’ll tell someone, “I’ll keep you in my thoughts and prayers” as a substitute for tangible assistance. Or my desire to fit every happening into a neat, understandable package compels me to speak when I first should listen.

Regardless of the situation, it seems a sad reality that so often these patterns of thought and action revolve around placing the self at the center of everything. Many function as if the world really does revolve around the immediate and urgent demands of living one’s own life. Everything is simply an incursion into the routine of putting me, myself, and I front and center. I automatically feel offended, for example, when cut off in traffic. I instinctively feel slighted or defensive that my very presence doesn’t delight and soothe the unhappy. I groan at the inconvenience of having to wait in another line and when I finally have my turn, I take offense at the clerk who doesn’t smile at me the way in which I think I deserve.

In his lauded address to graduates of Kenyon College, the late author David Foster Wallace exposed the routines of thought and action that place the self at the center.(1) In his remarks regarding the benefits of a liberal arts education in shaping one’s ability to think, he suggests that it is the “most obvious, important realities that are the hardest to talk about.”(2) In other words, one of those obvious realities is that when left to our own devices humans think and behave in self-centered ways. But it is one of those routines of thought that mostly goes unmentioned. He continues, “The choice is really about what to think about and how we think about it…to have just a little critical awareness….Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.”(3) Rarely, Foster Wallace notes, do we think about how we think because what is revealed is that we are basically selfish in action and thought 99% of the time.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Learning How to Think →

I have always loved that theologian David Wells refers to prayer as “rebelling against the status quo.”(1) No doubt the feisty among us have eyes that light up at the thought. To rebel against the status quo in this light is to challenge life where it has resigned itself to something less, to bring about rebirth and reformation where life or faith have grown stale.

Others may wonder what Christianity, and specifically Christian prayer, has to do with rebellion at all. The candid lyrics of a haunting song speak of Jesus Christ as a man of love and strength, but a man very much separated from everything we see and experience today. The lyrics sing of his living only inside our prayers, and come to the conclusion that while what Christ was may have indeed been beautiful, a man of the past can offer nothing at all for the here and now of real and wearying pain. The sentiment reflects a sorely honest philosophy that many have of the world today: It is what it is. And it won’t change anything to worry about it. Prayer, within such an imagination, is useless. The here and now of suffering is untouchable.

From headline to headline we find the weariness of life and the problem of a dark world screaming at us. Many have grown to see it as an unchangeable reality. But if we have come to terms with the world as it is, it is only because we have come to refuse thinking about how it could be, or how it was supposed to be, or how we could even have an idea that something is wrong in the first place. It is not that we are unconscious of the injustice, suffering, and even evil around us, but that we feel utterly powerless to do anything about it. Still others among us optimistically call for the abolishing of poverty or the end of trafficking or the stopping of whatever cause they are presently championing. While their efforts are needed, the end they call for doesn’t seem to ever occur.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Rebellion or Resignation →