Care Less
Now I’m towing my car, there’s a hole in the roof
My possessions are causing me suspicion but there’s no proof
— Don’t Dream It’s Over by Sixpence, None the Richer. Lyrics by Neil Finn
Ah, Freedom!
Our possessions bind us. The less we have, the more of ourselves we own. And now that I’ve unshackled my blog from the tyrannical clutches of Google’s Firebase, I am free to write again.
It occurred to me that what the world needs now is less caring.
Care less.
Care about fewer things. Care not about the clothes you wear or the conveniences and speed of your blog hosting provider. Care not about what the oligarchs of wicked social media empires do or think. Care less about freedoms being lost in America by the minute. Disregard the latest apostasy, heresy, or demonic proclamation from Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
Caring is what got us into this fine mess. Well, caring too much and praying too little, and eating when we should have been fasting. But, perhaps, caring too deeply about too many things triggered our prayerlessness and our fastlessness.
True caring requires action. If I care about something, I must defend it, promote it, protect it, advance it, study it, nurture it. For example, I have long cared about St. Louis Blues hockey. I have long cared about conservative politics and a just society.
Those things occupied a lot of my time. One could say, judging by my behavior, that I cared more about them, especially politics, than about my own children.
In all my caring, I abandoned God, of course. But I justified it, just as I justified missing years of my children’s lives. “I am fighting for justice and a better life for my kids and my neighbors and the whole world. Surely, God would rather I do that than kneel in a pew all day.”
There was no evidence that God preferred business to holiness, however. On the flip side, when one is so preoccupied with worldly things, one lacks the time to research whether or such propositions, such logical constructs, hold any scriptural water.
They didn’t, I’ve learned. Nothing but hot air.
Caring is why so many of us have been banned by Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Instagram. Caring is why we then spend hours a day waging appeals of our banishments. And, should we win our appeals, we go right back to spending countless hours tweeting and posting and sharing and liking and reposting and laughing at funny puppy videos.
Surely, God wants us doing that, too, or He wouldn’t have given us the internet.
Of course, God also gave us a tree in the middle of the Garden. A tree that produced fruit as pleasing to the eye as a cat video on Facebook. A tree we were admonished to ignore and not touch.
But we did.
We consumed the fruit of the tree, and the tree consumed us. Now, we have the tree and its bitter (but good looking) fruit, but we have not God.
Look at what the “other side” cares about and how much they care about it. They care enough to banish us from their web platforms. They care enough to outlaw our thoughts and ideas. They care enough to prohibit us from holding jobs. They care enough to burn down our businesses and homes.
Never say they don’t care; they care too much.
Caring less is hard. We are told every day to care more, to care about things that yesterday we didn’t even know existed. “Awareness” campaigns are designed to make us do one thing: care harder. Who, after all, wants to be known as “careless?”
I do, for one. Call me careless.
When we stop caring about things of this world, we have time and energy and brain space to care about things that do not die and decay. “Heaven and earth will pass away,” said the Lord, “but my words will not pass away.”
One person can care only so much about only so many things. The less “things” we care about, the more capacity we have to care about our mission in life.
And we all have the exact same mission, the same purpose in life: to get home again. To escape that this world that is quickly passing away and safely arrive in the home He prepared for us from before this dying world was born.
Care less.