Thursday, November 4, 2010

The bullying of immediate consequences

Imagine a life where there are no obligations to anyone, anything, except for the minimum of paying bills to live. This life would be something similar to the life of a three year old, with the necessary additions of adult responsibilities. What would you do with your time? In this scenario, when there are no obligations, there are no immediate consequences to your actions. Add a job, or a marriage, or kids, or any other normal thing and the obligations pile up, but they don’t disappear. Most of us would still have free time at that point, even if it is minimal.

In that free time we are given, we have no immediate consequences.

In the obligations we do have, there are varying degrees of intensity. If you miss work three days in a row, there are serious consequences. If you don’t come home for a week without telling your family, there will be consequences. If you don’t study for a final, there are consequences. And most of these are immediate. They’re easy to pay attention to because we don’t want to reap the results of shoddy work. Fulfilling these obligations are good, everyone should complete them as best they can, but what about the things that don’t scream so loudly when they’re neglected for a bit?

Parts of life like our relationship to God, our children, old friendships, or hobbies we’ve always wanted to take up?

I have great friends from my past, and it’s easy to tell myself that not talking to them often doesn’t harm anything. In fact, I can completely neglect those relationships and never see negative consequences. But that’s the point.

When negative consequences are what drives a person to act, or the more immediate one along with it, then life is not lived well.

When we shrug off worship or prayer, or time with old friends because they’re expendable and we have more pressing things to take care of, we let those things run our lives and we don’t have a healthy life.

Go back to that scenario I put forth at the beginning of this blog.

If your answer is that you will do nothing because you have no obligations to anyone, then you are living right now by the rule of immediate consequences.

We don’t need a hypothetical situation to figure out if a person is, though. All that’s needed is close examination of a person’s free time.

Had a day off? What did you do? Is that who you want to be?

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