PLASTIC WRAP…and the Health of Your Soul

I was wondering do you think much about the health of your soul. The following is an excerpt from John Eldredge’s book, Get Your Life Back. It speaks for itself and I think the FATC FORUM is a perfect place to share it. I’d love to hear your reaction. Feel free to share your thoughts on the FORUM.

…Then I ran across a news release so shocking I had to read it twice. It didn’t make the front page, but it should have: the average person now spends 93% of their life indoors (this includes your transportation time car, bus, or metro). Ninety-three percent—such a staggering piece of information. We should pause and let the tragedy sink in.

That means if you live to be 100, you will have spent 93 of those years in a little compartment and only 7 outside in the dazzling, living world. If we live to the more normal 75, we will spend 69 and three-fourths of our years indoors, and only 5 and one-fourth outside. This includes our childhood; how does a child be a child when they only venture outside a few months of their entire childhood.

This is a catastrophe, the final nail in the coffin for the human soul. You live nearly all your life in a fake world: artificial lighting instead of the warmth of sunlight or the cool of moonlight or the darkness of life itself. Artificial climate rather than the wild beauty of real weather; your world is always 68 degrees. All the surfaces you touch are things like plastic, nylon, and faux leather instead of meadow, wood and stream. Fake fireplaces; wax fruit. The atmosphere you inhabit is now asphyxiating with artificial smells—mostly chemicals and “air fresheners”—instead of cut grass, wood smoke, and salt air (is anyone weeping yet?). In place of the cry of the hawk, the thunder of a waterfall, and the comfort of crickets, your world spews of artificial sounds—all the clicks and beeps and whir of technology, the hum of the HVAC. Dear God, even the plants in your little bubble are fake. They give no oxygen; instead the plastic off-gases toxins, and if that isn’t a signal fire I don’t know what is.

This is the life for people in a science fiction novel. This would be understandable, acceptable, if we do colonize Mars and by necessity you lived in a bubble. But this is not the life God ordained for the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve, whose habitat is this sumptuous earth. It’s like putting wild horses in a Styrofoam box for the rest of their lives.

You live a bodily existence. The physical life, with all the glories of senses, appetites, and passions—this is the life God meant for us. It’s through our senses we learn most every important lesson. Even in spiritual acts of worship and prayer we are standing or kneeling, engaging bodily. God put your soul in this amazing body and then put you in a world perfectly designed for that experience.

Which is why the rescue of the soul takes place through our engagement with the real world. Thus the quote—variously attributed to Churchill, Will Rogers, and Reagan—that “The best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse.” Because when we encounter an actual horse—not online, not through Instagram, not the little horse emoji on your phone, but a living, breathing, dynamic thousand-pound animal, we are thrust into a dynamic encounter with the real. It calls things out of us, not only fears, anger, and impatience to be overcome, but intuition and presence and a sort of firm kindness that no video game can ever replicate. There’s no switch you can flip; you must engage. Reality shapes us.

I love world-class soccer (“football” in every country but the US); I can watch hours of it in a stretch. But I feel bleary-headed afterwards, foggy and disoriented, like a bird that hit a window. Just compare how you feel after binge-watching hours of screen anything—TV, video games, YouTube—with how you feel when you come off a mountain bike ride or a swim in the ocean. Living in an artificial world is like spending your life wrapped in plastic wrap. You wonder why you feel tired, numb, a little depressed, when the simple answer is you have a vitamin D deficiency; there’s no sunlight in your life, literally and figuratively.

Our body, soul and spirit atrophy because we were made to inhabit a real world, drawing life, joy, and strength from it. To be shaped by it, to relish in it. Living your days in an artificial world is like living your whole life with gloves on, a filtered experience, never really feeling anything. Then you wonder why your soul feels numb.

(Keep this in mind the next time you’re deciding whether or not to get out on the stream with your FATC buddies.)

• This topic was modified 5 months ago by JOHN MUCKERMAN.