MrCrowder.Com

Stretching Life’s Limits

I have a great idea. It hit me as I was riding down a street close to my work and saw one of those annoying, permanently posted speed limit feedback signs. I took it as a personal challenge to try and make it blink faster as I my speed increased.

Then I remembered an article a few years back where a state wanted to start giving tickets based on these radar-equipped signs. Just like the camera takes a photo of your license plate when you run a red light, this camera would snap your plate if you were breaking the speed limit.

Which led to my breakthrough idea: Let’s employ technology to make sure no one speeds. Ever.

Some high-tech system cooperates between a type of arrester on your engine and signals from localized speed limits to make sure no car can exceed the speed limit in a given space. I’m sure the technology exists already.

This sounds like an awesome idea.

Except it DOESN’T.

It sounds like a terrible idea.

While we’re at it, we could all just hook up feeding tubes that automatically sent us the daily nutrients and caloric intakes we needed without ever having to make decisions about Italian or Mexican, more carbs or less calories, cheese or sour cream or both. The problem with this is that it strips the joy out of something pleasurable.

And though with increasing traffic issues most of us don’t find driving a joy anymore (if we ever did), it’s a perfectly reasonable expression of individuality. We choose to drive, and to speed, and to neglect using our blinker (you know who you are, and I have invisible tomatoes ready to launch at your car).

I guess my point is that it is a terrible decision to enforce goodness and laws and limits mechanically.

Yet we do this in so many areas of life and I think we lose our soul because of it; some of them aren’t even bad things, we just end up delegating so much of our lives to rote processes.

We want people to tell us when to work out, for how long, how many times, and we want to know what the benefits will be specifically.

We want people to tell us what Bible passage to read, and when to read it, and for how long, and what to think about it, and how to act upon it. And we want to know what the results will be.

We want to plan our calendars so that we always know where to be, and who to be there with, and when to be there, and how long we’ll have to be there. We start to feel worthless when life isn’t calendared well.

We lose the ability to interpret life.

We lose the ability to let life come to us.

We lose the ability to let life stretch us and bend us and maybe, just maybe, break us.

We have to stop giving our lives over to plans and procedures and laws and limits. These things are good and helpful but they’re starting to run ruin us.

Life is too fragile to be automated; death is too near to cheapen life.

You can never stretch life to the limits when you think the parameters set up by you and others will keep you safe, sane, and normal.

You can lose your sanity stressing over insulating your life and following the rules to attempt to avoid pain.

Sometimes I worry that we don’t know how to live outside of the rules and set-up processes we’ve trusted for so long.

Do I know how to experience community without someone telling me to be somewhere at this time and for that long?

Do I know how to read my Bible apart from some plan to read it every morning at 8:00 am for 30 minutes?

Do I know how to love? Do I know how to give generously? Do I know how to share? And do I know how to do these things without regard for my sanity, safety, or self-preservation? I can’t help but think that’s the call of Jesus.

You see, no one has to tell me how savor food. And no one has to encourage me to drive how I need to and want to. This year, I want to try and learn how to experience the rest of life that way.