Banality
I waste a lot of time watching television. I also waste a lot of time playing FreeCell on the computer, or other similar mindless games. It’s my time to unwind, to decompress, I say to myself.
Andrée Seu posted in World Magazine’s blog (Thrumming) her experience during a hospital visit where she was detained because the doctor needed to get a second set of mammograms. She was sitting, waiting for hours with nothing to do, contemplating her mortality. As she looked around at the others waiting she thought “some of us detainees in the powder-blue gowns will get bad news today perhaps.” She also notices that each woman there in the waiting room is “thrumming” through a gossip magazine.
Her conclusion? “And I am reckoning hard with a new epiphany— that one of the most un-talked about and perhaps under-the-radar devices of Satan is that he has as little to do to trip us into hell as to fill our minds with a stream of banal thoughts.”
Banal: lacking originality, freshness, or novelty; trite; insipid; vapid
One of the comments on her post was from an older gentleman who said: “there is a point where you know you have ten more years, at most. But the temptations of banal thoughts don’t go away.”
At 59 (almost), if I fall in the category of those in Psalm 90:10 who are to live seventy years, then I have 11 years left. What am I to do in those 11 years? Or 25 years? Or 6 weeks?
Three things come to mind:
1) Death is not the end. There will be more time available for eternal things, such as fellowship with Jesus and with others who worship Him.
2) I need to prepare for death. That is I need to make sure my family is taken care of and that my house is in order.
3) I need to do life, and do it abundantly. I need to do the things from now until then that matter. I need to be actively involved in God’s work. I need to identify and continuously work on my weaknesses and enhance my strengths in order to accomplish these things.
None if these are new thoughts to me. But I’ve been taken captive by banality, and it’s time to break free.
Watching TV or playing FreeCell isn’t inherently bad. I just don’t have time for it.
… ok, maybe some football.
A Conversation with Death on Good Friday
From John Piper’s blog yet again:
CHRISTIAN:
Hello, Death, my old enemy. My old slave-master. Have you come to talk to me again? To frighten me?
I am not the person you think I am. I am not the one you used to talk to. Something has happened. Let me ask you a question, Death.
Where is your sting?
DEATH, sneeringly:
My sting is your sin.
CHRISTIAN:
I know that, Death. But that’s not what I asked you. I asked, where is your sting? I know what it is. But tell me where it is.
Why are you fidgeting, Death? Why are you looking away? Why are you turning to go? Wait, Death, you have not answered my question. Where is your sting?
Where is, my sin?
What? You have no answer? But, Death, why do you have no answer? How will you terrify me, if you have no answer?
O Death, I will tell you the answer. Where is your sting? Where is my sin? It is hanging on that tree. God made Christ to be sin—my sin. When he died, the penalty of my sin was paid. The power of it was broken. I bear it no more.
Farewell, Death. You need not show up here again to frighten me. God will tell you when to come next time. And when you come, you will be his servant. For me, you will have no sting.
O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory
through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:55-57)
