The advantage of closing a few doors.

Click here for the NY Times article. The point of the article is the level of fear we experience if options are reduced, even options that have proven themselves to have no particular benefit. We will do crazy things to keep options open. As in:

You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship. Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will.

After setting up a behavioral experiment, the author observes:

Apparently they did not care so much about maintaining flexibility in the future. What really motivated them was the desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching a door close. “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says.

It makes me wonder about my Christ-following. I follow, but with options open. Maybe that explains a lot about the weakness I often feel, the fear I experience. Jesus asks me to go through the pain of closing doors for the One who is the Way, the One Door.

Today is the twenty-fourth day of Lent

 Click on Church Fathers Lenten Reading Plan: With Texts. Scroll down to page 122. The readings continue to be St Athanasius and his life of St. Anthony. It was St. Anthony who is the father of the monastic movement, a movement that stood over against the compromises and lukewarmness of a church no longer under persecution and now part of the power structures of society. Evangelicalism is experimenting with a new monasticism that is moving away from voter bloc religion to service and sacrifice for the poor and left behind.

What is church supposed to look like?

From John Wimber via Bill Kinnon

Folks, the world knows what this is supposed to look like. Years ago in New York City, I got into a taxi cab with an Iranian taxi driver, who could hardly speak English. I tried to explain to him where I wanted to go, and as he was pulling his car out of the parking place, he almost got hit by a van that on its side had a sign reading The Pentecostal Church. He got real upset and said, “That guy’s drunk.” I said, “No, he’s a Pentecostal. Drunk in the spirit, maybe, but not with wine.” He asked, “Do you know about church?” I said, “Well, I know a little bit about it; what do you know?” It was a long trip from one end of Manhattan to the other, and all the way down he told me one horror story after another that he’d heard about the church. He knew about the pastor that ran off with the choir master’s wife, the couple that had burned the church down and collected the insurance—every horrible thing you could imagine. We finally get to where we were going, I paid him, and as we’re standing there on the landing I gave him an extra-large tip. He got a suspicious look in his eyes—he’d been around, you know. I said, “Answer me this one question.” Now keep in mind, I’m planning on witnessing to him. “If there was a God and he had a church, what would it be like?” He sat there for awhile making up his mind to play or not. Finally he sighed and said, “Well, if there was a God and he had a church—they would care for the poor, heal the sick, and they wouldn’t charge you money to teach you the Book.” I turned around and it was like an explosion in my chest. “Oh, God.” I just cried, I couldn’t help it. I thought, “Oh Lord, they know. The world knows what it’s supposed to be like. The only ones that don’t know are the Church.”