Bright Spot: While we seek space, we're built for contact
One of the major pharmaceutical companies that developed one of the leading vaccines against COVID-19 just had a giant training event. After that event, guess what illness many attendees brought home? Can you spell I-R-O-N-Y? Can you say S-U-P-E-R S-P-R-E-A-D-E-R?
Then there is the company that made at-home work popular and possible, ZOOM, which now is requiring its workers to go … drum roll … back to the office.
Not a popular move with many workers who’ve been enjoying showing up for work in their undies and eating scrumptious brunches at 10 a.m. all in the comfort of home. Everyone is still collecting full compensation for the same work they used to do after fighting an hour of rush hour traffic.
Ironies abound.
Another one: humans are designed for connecting with other humans. On the lists for longevity, both quantity and quality years, and backed by hundreds of scientific studies, healthy social connections always make the list of the top five factors. It ranks right alongside sleep, stress management, diet and exercise. Yet, instead of connecting, we’re often rejecting.
I’ve said it many times – one of the foulest four-letter words in our language is “busy.” Yet, that’s one of the top three responses to the classic question: “How are you?”
Yet...what does that one word really communicate? Don’t ask me to do anything, especially more work. Or to get together with you and yours. Or to do a favor. Or to have more than a three-minute conversation. Or to listen to your sad “song” of “whine and woes-es.”
Yet, we are designed by our creator God for connection.
Jesus lamented a sad irony in Mark 5:1-20. He had miraculously delivered a man who had been possessed by demons for years, causing him to run screaming, cutting himself, bleeding and naked through the hills and cemeteries in broken chains which had tried to restrain him.
But instead of celebrating the healing of a horribly broken man, his neighbors plead with Jesus to leave their area, because in delivering the man. Jesus had also put a big dent in the local economy. Like the slothful sleeper hangs on his hotel doorknob, they had hung invisible signs that shouted to Jesus: “Please keep out...do not disturb!”
In Matthew 23:37 when Jerusalem, actually the entire world, needed Jesus most, their pushing him away caused him to weep over his people: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her winds, but you were not willing.”
We’ve entered the “season of stiff arms” to borrow a maneuver from football running backs. Are you keeping the God who made and loves you at arm’s length or farther? What an awful irony when we all need him so.
Rick Sams is pastor emeritus of Alliance Friends Church.
This article originally appeared on The Alliance Review: Bright Spot: While we seek space, we're built for contact
