Top 5: Things to keep you awake at night

Sometimes I wonder if God ever meant for us to make so much of this world. I wonder if He intended us to focus on technology and human achievements to improve our standard of living and our ability to make money, rather than place our efforts in the box of character development, loving people, and becoming more like Christ.

Up until a few hundred years ago the standard of living had not changed for millenia. Oh how things are different now - I type this on a laptop connected to wifi, connected to a satellite, connected back to an ISP of some sort, connected to the rest of the world - that in itself is fairly close to a man-made miracle when you think about all the bits of plastic and metal and invisible signals that cross paths in mid air to shake hands with other bits of aforementioned stuff to make something like that happen.

So I start thinking about what we've acheived as human-kind, and how we have suddenly over the last hundred years developed so much to improve our quality of life. I think of a great Switchfoot line "we were meant to live for so much more, have we lost ourselves". I wonder where its all heading, and what does God think about all our technology that we worship - were we ever supposed to take it this far? Is a heavenly tear shed at the scientist working late each night to develop the new bit of stuff to sell to Google to make a million all the while leaving his family at home to endure the silence of dinner without dad? Or is such behaviour covered under some Ecclesiastes 3:22 action - "There is nothing better for man than to enjoy his work, because that is his lot. For who can bring him to see what will happen after him?" Maybe Henry Ford or Thomas Edison were reading this passage while in their pursuit of invention. Oh Ecclesiastes, so full of dichotomy and paradox!

Anyway, so here is my top 5 of things to keep you awake at night about the earth and everything in it:
1. All the wifi, cellphone, and electronic gadgetry signals flying through the air must be doing something to my brain and body (and yours!) that will rear its ugly head in about 40 yrs in a way that cannot be imagined.
2. The end of oil will come before i get to own a classic Triumph motorcycle, therefore dashing my dreams of really being eternally happy.
3. What happens to all the computers in the world when people upgrade - eventually they must go somewhere?
4. Where does all the concrete in a big city come from, and who paid for it all? - that's a lot of concrete mixing!
5. Eventually the pressure for land for housing development will overtake all the farms, and as people get sick of the hard work of farming and move to an urban environment to design things to sell to Google, there will be no farmers left and then what will the people in the cities eat?

I love the way that some words translate from English to Spanish - "worry" translates directly to "preocupación" i.e. preoccupation, which is described as "the absorption of the attention or intellect". What am I preoccupied with, and why? I turn myself to the first theme of this post - God wanted so much more for us than earthly preoccupation; and there is the spot for the mental crowbar to be inserted and pry my thinking away from the things of Earth, towards the things of Heaven.