Slothfulness

Che Guevara is known internationally as a Marxist revolutionary. As he recruited for his guerilla operations in Cuba, the Congo, and Bolivia he often encountered the half-heartedness of his volunteers.

Author John Lee Anderson quotes Che’s sarcastic evaluation of the freshly trained recruits who had just arrived to fight in the Congo:

In a ludicrous sideshow, the captain had also brought over forty new Congolese rebel ‘graduates,’ fresh from a training course in the Soviet Union. Like their Bulgarian and Chinese-trained predecessors, they immediately requested two weeks of vacation, while also complaining that they had nowhere to put their luggage. Che wrote, ‘It would be a little comic if it weren’t so sad, to see the disposition of these boys in whom the revolution had deposited its faith.’

Possible Preaching Angle:

The church also faces the same issue with those who are called to follow our Savior. We are not called to be part-time disciples looking for a life of leisure. Jesus calls for us to “take your cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). He also promises to give us immense rewards stored up in heaven for the sacrifices we make for his cause (Matt. 19:29).

A man from Scotland noticed positive changes in his lifestyle after he decided to stop watching television in the evening. 41-year-old Stephen Clarke said, “Now I spend my time creating the reality I want rather than numbing myself from the one I have.”

Mr. Clarke grew up watching television at home as it seemed like a normal thing for him to do. After completing work, he would watch movies or DVDs. Since he already followed a healthy lifestyle, he didn’t experience any glaring negative effects from watching television, but it was the “not-so-obvious side effects” that he eventually became aware of.

Mr. Clarke noticed, “I could feel the energy I was taking on board from the movies and shows I was watching. The drama, the violence, the stress, not to mention the blue light from screens late at night activating and heightening my nervous system and exaggerating all of this.”

Describing television as a “hypnosis machine,” Mr. Clarke said the blue light along with the flashing images that constantly change at a fast pace makes the narrative a part of your subconscious. “The news is constantly giving us reason to be scared, why we’re different from one another, and why we all need to shield and protect ourselves.”

He also felt that while watching television, he wasn’t processing his own thoughts, but rather numbing them, his emotions, and his energy. Instead of working through them, he began blurring his clarity and vision for life. “I experienced big transitions in my life, and I was numbing the feelings of that with screens in the evening, rather than doing what I should have been doing.”

Knowing this, he was keen on making a change.

The father of three began to learn new things such as wood carving, playing a musical instrument, and more. Additionally, he was able to spend more time reading books, cooking, and going on adventures.

He said, “Every month that passes without constant TV exposure gives me more clarity on what I’m doing and how I choose to live my life. My relationships are transforming as well as my working life.”

Mr. Clarke hasn’t cut television out of his life completely, but when he does watch it, he tries to bring value to what he is watching.

Do you realize that 30 percent of all men of working age in this culture are not working? There are many reasons for this. Some workers lack the skills needed for all but the lowest-paid jobs. Some jobs have been eliminated because of technology advances or cheaper overseas labor. Some have discovered government benefits that enable them to avoid working.

A study for the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, reports that “75 percent of inactive prime-age men are in a household that received some form of government transfer payment.” The researcher believes that government disability benefits in particular are one reason for the lack of interest in work.

Another trend toward irresponsibility is the growth of the video-gaming culture in our society. Many young men and women are spending countless hours every day or many hours of the night just gaming away. They may lose sleep, college opportunities, and work advancement with addictions to meaningless competitions that consume time and energy but produce nothing.

Possible Preaching Angle:

What would you call a pastime where a person spends all their time, all their money, all their resources, pursuing things that are not real and that never will benefit them or society? We would call it slavery. And those who are enslaved by such meaningless pursuits ultimately lose all respect for themselves. Work gives us dignity, because work itself is dignified.

Two school officials have been suspended after a firestorm of controversy involving a single email. Nicole Joseph and Hasina Mohyuddin are the associate dean and assistant dean, respectively, at the Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. The pair of staffers were required to “temporarily step back from their positions,” after they authored an all-campus email responding to the mass shooting at Michigan State University just days earlier. The email sparked outrage because some of the text was credited as having been written by ChatGPT, the popular AI writing tool.

It’s ironic that both deans worked in the college’s Office of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, because most of the complaints stemmed from the fact that students didn’t feel the emails were particularly inclusive or equitable. On the contrary, student Bethanie Stauffer felt it was “disgusting.” She said, “There is a sick and twisted irony to making a computer write your message about community and togetherness because you can’t be bothered to reflect on it yourself.”

The next day, Joseph sent an apology email, but the damage had been done. Senior Laith Kayat said, “Deans, provosts, and the chancellor: Do more. Do anything. And lead us into a better future with genuine, human empathy, not a robot. [Administrators] only care about perception and their institutional politics of saving face.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is better to be authentic and make an effort to communicate, rather than using shortcuts. Leaders must demonstrate a commitment to serving and resist thoughtless communication.

Leonardo da Vinci is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. As an artist, he is known for The Last Supper and The Mona Lisa among others. However, his total output in painting is really rather small. There are less than 17 surviving paintings that can be definitely attributed to him, and several of them are unfinished.

The small number of surviving paintings is due in part to his chronic procrastination. He often required a sharp threat by his patrons that they were about to withhold payment to motivate him. The Mona Lisa took over 15 years for him to finish. Worse was The Virgin of the Rocks, commissioned with a seven-month deadline. Da Vinci finished it 25 years later. Da Vinci apologized on his deathbed "to God and Man for leaving so much undone."

Possible Preaching Angle:

God calls his people to build his kingdom--to transform people in the name of Jesus. However, many of us procrastinate. Other “more important” things get in the way. There will come a day when we may look back upon our lives with regret for the things left unfinished.

Donelan Andrews was rewarded with $10,000 by his travel insurance company, all for doing something he teaches students to do every day: read carefully. Squaremouth intentionally added language in its policy documentation offering a reward for anyone who was still reading the details. Their intent was to promote the idea of reading the details carefully, because failure to understand the details of what their policies cover is the number one reason why travel insurance claims are denied.

Of course, a denied claim is only one example of the kind of loss lurking in the fine print. In the United Kingdom, Manchester-based firm Purple provided free Wi-Fi access in 2017 for over 22,000 people. Buried in their terms of service was a commitment to a thousand hours of community service, which could include “cleaning toilets and relieving sewer blockages.” In a story with The Guardian, representatives from Purple explained that they inserted the clause “to illustrate the lack of consumer awareness of what they are signing up to when they access free Wi-Fi.”

But even a thousand hours of service is a mere pittance compared to what Londoners gave up when they consented to the “Herod clause” of security firm F-Secure’s Wi-Fi experiment. That clause provided service only if “the recipient agreed to assign their firstborn child to us for the duration of eternity.”

Not to be outdone, British retailer GameStation once changed its license agreement to a pre-checked box. Unless users unchecked the box, they granted the company “a nontransferable option to claim, for now and forever more, your immortal soul."

Potential Preaching Angles: (1) God wants disciples who will willingly count the cost of discipleship, not be suckered into it because they weren't paying attention. (2) The details of Scripture matter to God. It is a matter of obedience or disobedience. Of course God cares about the details because he loves us, not because he’s trying to trick us.

Law professor and technology expert Tim Lu claims that there's an underestimated force that drives our daily lives—convenience. We want nearly everything about our lives to be convenient, efficient, and easy. Wu calls convenience "the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies." He writes:

As Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, recently put it, "Convenience decides everything." Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I "prefer.") Easy is better, easiest is best.

Of course there are benefits to some of life's conveniences, but he also warns that there can be a dark side. Wu argues:

With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us … When we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.

Possible Preaching Angles: Discipleship; Disciples—Jesus did not offer convenience in following him. He warned us to count the cost and at times to do what is inconvenient in order to follow him.

In the ongoing battle against oversleeping, humanity has devised some clever alarm clocks. But for all their clever designs, most alarm clocks still suffer from a common drawback: the fact that they're not designed for multiple users. When one person's alarm goes off, other people in the room or throughout the house have to wake up too. Most alarm clocks have no way to selectively wake up one person and leave the other person undisturbed. Until now, that is.

Wake is a new breed of alarm that targets individual users and wakes up one sleeper without rousing others. Here's how it works. After it's mounted to the wall above the bed, the device uses an infrared temperature sensor and special body-tracking software to discern where each person is lying (without a camera). When it's time to wake one person up, Wake silently takes aim, rotates into position, and then directs a tight burst of light and sound at their face.

To keep from rousing other sleepers, the device uses a set of parametric speakers capable of focusing sound into a narrow beam. Think of it as a spotlight for noise. If Wake is pointed straight at your head you'll hear it loud and clear, but if you're outside of the beam's small radius, the sound will be extremely faint.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) God calls you to wake up and live the Christian life, don't sleep through it; (2) The voice of God is personal and heard only by each individual, like Paul on the road to Damascus, to young Samuel in his sleep.

In the mid-'70s, an unknown editor named Gary Dahl was talking with his friends, who were complaining about all the work involved in caring for pets—feeding them, walking them, cleaning up after them. Dahl kidded that he had a pet that never caused him any trouble—a pet rock.

Surprisingly, the joke started to take off. Dahl recruited two colleagues as investors, visited a building-supply store and bought a load of smooth Mexican beach stones at about a penny apiece. The Pet Rock hit the marketplace in time for Christmas 1975. In a matter of months, some 1.5 million rocks were sold. It was a craze to rival the Hula-Hoop. For a mere three dollars and 95 cents, a consumer could buy … a rock—a plain, ordinary, egg-shaped rock of the kind one could dig up in almost any backyard.

For a few frenzied months in 1975, more than a million consumers did, becoming the proud—if slightly abashed—owners of Pet Rocks, the fad that Newsweek later called "one of the most ridiculously successful marketing schemes ever." When Dahl died in March 2015, his New York Times obituary claimed "the concept of a 'pet' that required no actual work and no real commitment resonated with the self-indulgent '70s, and before long a cultural phenomenon was born."

Pet Rocks made Dahl a millionaire practically overnight, but despite the boon Pet Rocks brought him he came to regret his success. The Pet Rock craze went the way of all fads—it died out and was replaced by the next fad. After his sudden wealth, he went through three marriages, a law suit, and failed attempts to match his previous success. At one point he said, "Sometimes I look back and wonder if my life wouldn't have been simpler if I hadn't done it."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Success; Ambition; Achievement; Emptiness—all of the success in the world can't satisfy our heart's need for Jesus Christ. (2) Conformity; Worldliness—It's amazing how a silly fad—a Pet Rock—can take off and become a worldwide craze.

The busyness of life has propelled many of us to get more rest. It's often a case of survival in the midst of unrelenting pressure. Research studies have been showing how essential sleep is to our mental and physical health. Now a new study on sleep says this: Wake Up! This latest study suggests that an overly long night's sleep could be just as bad for you as not getting enough sleep.

The study concludes, "… adults who usually sleep for less than six hours or more than eight, are at risk of dying earlier than those sleep for between six and eight hours." So, the magic number from these studies is 7 hours of sleep.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Maybe Hamlet had it right all along when he said, "Aye, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come."

One of today's most popular sports cheers was first chanted in 1999 during the fourth quarter of an Army-Navy football game. The six-word cheer—I believe that we will win!—has been called the "epitome of classic American optimism." But according to emerging research, for all of its sincerity, in real life this "I believe we will win" attitude tends to backfire.

For instance, a study found that overly optimistic grad students have a tougher time finding jobs. Researchers interviewed students in their last year of grad school, asking them to rate how likely they thought they were to land a good job shortly after leaving school. Two years later, those who had admitted to frequent positive fantasies about life after grad school were less likely to succeed in their job search. They sent out fewer résumés, and the daydreamers ultimately earned less than the students who had a more realistic take on their post-university lives.

In that same paper, researchers asked a different set of students about the person they currently, secretly, had feelings for. Five months later, the students who had spent the most time fantasizing about their future lives with their crushes were the least likely to have actually started relationships with them. Many of them hadn't even tried. The people with more moderate expectations, on the other hand, were more likely to approach the object of their affection and own up to their feelings.

Positive thinking has its place, but don't mistake the warm fuzzies that accompany daydreaming about achieving your goals for, you know, actually achieving those goals.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Hope; Faith; Belief—This is a great way to introduce the hearty, solid, more-than-just-optimistic nature of true biblical hope, or to show how "faith" is only as good as the object we place it in. (2) Diligence; Planning; Goals—It can also show the need to work for our goals rather than living like sluggards who never plan or work.

You may not like your job, but I'm willing to bet that you're nowhere near as good at avoiding it as an Italian coal miner was recently revealed to be. According to The Telegraph, "Carlo Cani started work as a miner in 1980 but soon found that he suffered from claustrophobia and hated being underground.

Cani started doing everything he could to avoid hacking away at the coal face, inventing an imaginative range of excuses for not venturing down the mine in Sardinia where he was employed. He pretended to be suffering from amnesia and hemorrhoids, rubbed coal dust into his eyes to feign an infection and on occasion staggered around pretending to be drunk. The miner, now aged 60, managed to accumulate years of sick leave, apparently with the help of compliant doctors, and was able to stay at home to indulge his passion for jazz."

Possible Preaching Angle:

I'd probably rather play jazz than mine coal too, but what's wrong with our ideas about work when our vocation becomes something that we spend a career avoiding?

In an experiment in London, security firm F-Secure set up on open Wi-Fi network in a busy public area. But there was a hidden, devilish catch. When people connected to the network, they were presented with (the usual) lengthy terms and conditions. Well-hidden was a "Herod Clause," stating that by using this Wi-Fi you were "giving permanent ownership of the user's firstborn child" to F-Secure. Six people clicked through the "Herod Clause" and accepted the terms.

Possible Preaching Angle:

What a potent illustration of the "hidden costs" of so many things and behaviors that we take for granted.

Eugene J. Polley lived his entire life in the Chicago area, where he worked for Zenith Electronics for 47 years. Hired as a stock boy during the Depression, he eventually became an engineer with 18 patents to his credit. But his most famous invention would become known as the TV remote control.

In 1950, Zenith released a product called Lazy Bones, a cumbersome device tethered to the TV by a long cord. Zenith's founder demanded something better. So in 1955 Mr. Polley produced an innovation called the Flash-Matic, a ray-gun remote control sold just as TV sets were making their way into every American home. "Absolutely harmless to humans!" the Flash-Matic ads promised. Within decades, a television could be found in practically every American home, and nearly every TV set had a remote to go with it.

At one point in his life, Polley had high hopes for his invention. He said, "Maybe I did something for humanity—like the guy who invented the flush toilet." But although the TV remote has helped the disabled and elderly, it has also been blamed for contributing to obesity, sparking marital spats, and causing many TV viewers to "zone out" as they "channel surf." For many people, a TV remote control has become a symbol for convenience and even laziness. As John Ortberg once half-jokingly wrote, "Life without the remote control is an unbearable burden for the modern American family."

Towards the end of his life, Polley seemed to regret some of these negative consequences of the TV remote. He said, "Everything has to be done remotely now or forget it. Nobody wants to get off their fat and flabby to control [their own] electronic devices."

It's no secret that procrastination has a high price tag: it costs money, it undermines relationships, and it lowers job performance. In recent years, numerous psychologists have studied the prevalence and consequences of procrastination. The following facts provide an overview of some of the more interesting findings about this research:

• About 15-20 percent of adults are regular procrastinators.
• About 80-95 percent of college students are considered procrastinators.
• Many Americans don't have enough money for their retirement because of putting off saving during their working life.
• The Oregon Health and Science University tested several thousand people's level of cholesterol. Of the 19,800 who tested for high cholesterol, 35 percent did not see a doctor for at least 5 months.
• A University of Windsor in Ontario study found that procrastinators had higher stress levels and more household accidents than non-procrastinators.
• The vast majority of procrastinators—95 percent—want to end their habit but can't. One psychologist said: "Habits become non-conscious brain processes. When procrastination becomes chronic, a person is essentially running on autopilot."

Too much comfort is dangerous. Literally.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley did an experiment some time ago that involved introducing an amoeba into a perfectly stress-free environment: ideal temperature, optimal concentration of moisture, constant food supply. The amoeba had an environment to which it had to make no adjustment whatsoever.

So you would guess this was one happy little amoeba. Whatever it is that gives amoebas ulcers and high blood pressure was gone. Yet, oddly enough, it died.

Apparently there is something about all living creatures, even amoebas, that demands challenge. We require change, adaptation, and challenge the way we require food and air. Comfort alone will kill us.

(Study source: Chris Peterson, "Optimism and By-pass Surgery," in

Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control

[New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993])

Carelessness is the initial phase of sinning.

Since love is work, the essence of nonlove is laziness.

From a sermon on the poor:

"Anyone who would not work should not eat" (2 Thessalonians 3:10). But the laws of Saint Paul are not merely for the poor. They are for the rich as well. We accuse the poor of laziness. This laziness is often excusable. We ourselves are often guilty of worse idleness.

Do not allow your eyes to sleep or your eyelids to slumber until the hour of your death, but labor without ceasing that you may enjoy life without end.