Too much information

There are many diseases in the world today. Poverty in the third world leads to aids, malaria, and dysentery. Prosperity at home blesses us with diabetes, cholesterol, and heart disease. While I claim no medical expertise, I am noticing a silent killer that I think may be more deadly than all of these.

I call it numbness of soul.

I am currently reading Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy, the story of the 2006 shooting in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. I remember the event. I followed the story on CNN and have often used the response of the Amish to point to the kind of forgiveness that all Christians are called to offer to the world around them. I expected to be reminded of these truths as I picked up the book and started to read. What I did not expect was the depth of emotion that rose up from within me as once again I heard of how Charles Carl Roberts IV planned and executed the massacre. My eyes filled with tears as I read how Amish children offered their lives in an attempt to save others, how one mother held her daughter while she died in one hospital only to travel to another hospital and repeat the same experience with another daughter, and how a community responded in a way unimaginable by the world around them. At one point I had to close the book, my heart heavy with the grief that accompanies this kind of tragedy.

I learned nothing new about the event as I read, but my eyes were opened to a deeper truth about myself. I realized the flippant nature with which I had approached the story when it first happened. I skimmed the surface of the tragedy, took a moment to allow the shock of the event to register in my mind, and then flitted off to some other news story that caught my eye – the rise or fall of the market, the latest Hollywood scandal, the empty campaign promises made by some political candidate.

“Surfing the internet” is such a good phrase. We skim the surface but never penetrate. We ride on top of this powerful force of evil, controlling it for our own enjoyment. We become addicted to the adrenalin rush of speeding over tragedy, and if we are really good at it, we don’t even get our hair wet.

Yet this time I fell in. The truth of what actually happened filtered deeper than the headlines of CNN had penetrated almost three years ago. Instead of surfing I was pulled under, confronted by my own inability to control this wave, terrified by the power of what actually happened. Though it felt as if I was drowning, the overwhelming nature of the event allowed me to make connections between my eyes, my head, and my heart. All of the sudden the mothers and fathers who lost their daughters were like me. My four daughters were the girls who lost their lives. The horrendous nature of the event poured its coldness deep into my soul and for a brief moment I saw something very clearly. When I first heard the story I was numb to the reality of what happened.

I live in a world where there is more information at my fingertips than ever before. Yet in my gluttony of knowledge I find that I often stuff so much in that I fail to taste any of it. Rather than experience the story and reflect on what God is saying to me through it, I am content to merely possess the information. While humanity grieves I am thinking of how this will become a topic to fill a lull in conversation or a great sermon illustration. I know more about what is going on in the world than any generation before me, yet I am impacted by it less.

I have become so conditioned to the normalcy of death and evil that my soul doesn’t even flinch. While numbness is a natural way to avoid pain, pervasive and continual numbness destroys us. A numb soul forgets how to feel. We lose touch with things that should shape us. Within days of the shooting I had lost interest in story, but those who lived it had not. Their lives were forever different.

I have written how often words can be overused and undervalued. Maybe the same is true of knowledge. Maybe we need to know about fewer things but know about them in a deeper way, a way that touches our soul, a way that impacts us. Maybe the danger in our world is not of knowing too little, but of knowing too much; skimming the surface of life instead of living it. Maybe in occupying our minds we neglect to develop our soul.

If so, we will one day suffer the consequences.

Maybe we already are.