Making the Bed: Foundations
Suppose you were given the options of sitting alone with your thoughts or undergoing electric shocks. Does it shock you (sorry, couldn’t resist) that “two-thirds of men and one-fourth of women in [the study] chose to voluntarily shock themselves rather than sit in silence” (33)? What does this say about a significant number of us!? What’s going on in people’s minds that it’s so awful that people can’t sit quietly with their ponderings? Where does your mind go when given the opportunity to wander and wonder?
By contrast, Warren also goes to the other extreme of people’s inner life. She tells of a student who was protesting having to read writings by Augustine. (For those of you who don’t recognize that name, Augustine was a North African man who struggled with accepting the truths of Christianity, but eventually accepted them and eventually became a saint. He wrote 13 books between 397 and 400 A.D. about his life before and after his conversion.) When the student grumbled that the writing was “boring”, the professor insisted that it wasn’t boring; the student was. “...When we gaze at the richness of the gospel and the church and find them dull and uninteresting, it’s actually we who have been hollowed out. We have lost our capacity to see wonders where true wonders lie. We must be formed as people who are capable of appreciating goodness, truth, and beauty” (34).
Let’s reflect on that idea for a moment. Sometimes this culture we live in seems so frivolous and meaningless. Perhaps the values that it tries to imprint onto us leaves us with an inability to hold deep and timeless thoughts in our heads and turn them over with appreciation. How terrifying to think of ourselves as “hollowed out” human beings! That may be even more terrifying to me to think of people’s brains not having ANYWHERE to go when they sit alone and think than into the darkness of negative thoughts! It’s as if we are lacking in depth and soul. Think about the way the world flashes and dances images in front of us so quickly and constantly, and understand that this can become our way of processing this world around us. This increasingly pervasive habit of scrolling through only reading headlines or reading half an article here and there feeds that habit of habitually losing interest in the depth of things in life around us or diving headfirst and spending time with the stories that should matter most.
Now, after describing this dismal picture before us of our human plight, most certainly we must encourage ourselves to seek a different path, for this one is full of shallowness and discouragement. We must learn to search, direct, and intentionally focus our eyes toward where we can find this goodness, truth, and beauty that we ought to be appreciating and using to help form us in the very fabric of our souls.
“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” says Romans 11:33 When we are looking for eternal and lasting foundations of goodness, truth, and beauty that we can build our lives on, the Word of God is the best place where we can possibly go. Imagine sitting in that tranquil room and hearing the beautiful promises of God running through your mind. Have you hidden the words of God in your heart? Do you walk outside at night and ponder the words of Psalm 8, verses 3 and 4, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” When you drive into Montana or Colorado, do you mouth the words of Psalm 121, verses 1 and 2, “I lift up my eyes to the mountains — where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.”
If you were able to bring to mind and focus on these types of Bible verses in your seclusion, you might even volunteer to sit in that room longer than the required time. You would close your eyes and smile with all the reminders of God’s provision and love for you washing over you and bringing you peace and joy. You’d no longer be hollowed out; instead you’d be filled to overflowing with the overwhelming realization that the Creator of this universe wants an intimate relationship with you. Doesn’t that sound like a better way of shocking yourself?
