In This Crazy Busy World, How do you Live in True Freedom? Here's How

I kinda knew it was bad, even though I still do it more than I’d like to admit.  Heck, I was trying hard not to do it while writing this post.  My guess is that you do it too, at least some of the time.   But if you’re like me, you likely have no idea how bad, even dangerous it is.  

I did know this.  I knew it didn’t work.   People think it helps them produce more.  But every study, and I mean every single study, shows it doesn’t do that at all.   No, it makes you produce less, a lot less. It literally makes you stupider.  Your IQ goes down at about the same rate as someone who has smoked marijuana or stayed up all night.  For guys, it gets worse.  When we do it, we get about as sharp as an eight-year-old.  Now, I’m not knocking eight-year-olds, but there’s a reason 8 years olds don’t drive cars or run companies or handle heavy machinery. Just sayin’

It may even damage your brain.  They know folks who do a lot of this are definitely brain damaged.  They just don’t know if the practice created the brain damage or if you do the practice because you are already brain damaged.   It might even lead you to walk into traffic.  In a study of 1400 folks who got hit by a car, one out of ten got hit because they were doing this.  Now this last one, you gotta know.  I sure did.  Doing this totally messes up your relationships.  In other words, it irritates people a lot, including you when others do it to you.    So, to summarize, it messes up everything, your memory, your emotional intelligence, your stress level, your degree of depression and social anxiety.  Yet you almost certainly do it.  Heck, you may be doing it now, while I’m talking to you.

So, what is it?   It’s multi-tasking, you know checking your phone while you’re doing something else, interrupting some other task to check an email, doing one chore while you’re in the middle of another one.  And if you’re thinking right now.  Ok, that’s some people, but that’s not me.  I’m good at multi-tasking.  You are wrong.  It would be like saying that you are good at flying, that you can just flap your arms and achieve altitude.  It’s that crazy.  No human being on the face of the earth can multi-task well.  We just aren’t built that way.  The human brain can only focus on one thing at time.  You start focusing on two things, or God forbid, three or four and it won’t work, ever.   As the writer, Justin Earley puts it.  "To be two places at a time is to be no place at all." 

So, then why do we do it? And how can we find a way to stop it, to stop something that is literally messing up our lives in almost every way.   In these words, from the very beginning of everything, God points the way.   Let’s listen and hear what God has to say. 

Genesis 2:10-17

Human beings get so caught up in doing too much stuff, in taking too many things on, that we literally wreck our lives (texting while driving for example -hello?)  Why?  Well, human beings don’t like limits.   And that’s a problem, especially when our limit-breaking ways aren’t just breaking us, they’re now breaking the planet.  So, how do you break yourself of your limit-pushing ways.  Here God shows you.  God shows you that only when you live in the limits do you become truly free.

A few weeks ago, we looked at the first creation story, where God pointed out how all of creation lives in rhythm, and how crucial it is that we do the same.  And now, in God’s second creation story, God gives sort of the sequel to that message, how everything lives in limits, and how crucial it is that you do the same. 

And in this story, God literally gives you the limits.  God tells you how this very particular garden has as its border four different rivers.   And then God says within this garden, you have free rein, except for this one tree.   Please don’t go there.  If you do, you’re gonna be real sorry, so don’t go there ok. 

But do you see what God does not do?  God doesn’t set up angels to prevent the human from touching the tree.  God doesn’t put one of those invisible fences that people put on their yards for their pets that’ll zap them if they get too close.  No.  God basically says to the human. “I’m giving you the freedom to choose.   I’ve told you what I want you to do, but in the end, it’s up to you.”

But at the same time, God frames the conditions of that choice.  God warns.  Your choice, if you make the wrong one, will have certain consequences, really bad consequences.   In other words, human freedom has limits.  And if you ignore the limits of that freedom, then you’re going to get yourselves in trouble.  

 Yet here’s the problem, too often human beings do just that.  Every day, folks, including me, go through life exercising our freedom but paying very little attention to the limits surrounding it.  That’s why folks still multi-task, even when they know it doesn’t work.   They want more even when they know.  More won’t ever work.  Why?  

No one likes to face the limits.  But here’s the problem.  When you ignore the limits, they don’t go away.  No. the limits end up breaking you.  So, you find yourself eating too much, and then get dismayed when the next morning you’ve gained three pounds.  Or you make poor choices with your time, and then get shocked when you don’t have time to do something you really need to do.    Or you treat people around you carelessly and then are surprised when they grow angry or distant.  

And in the last year, limit breaking has hits in a whole new, devastating way.  When Covid came along, no matter what we did, people would have died.  But here’s the tragedy.  It didn’t have to be over half a million.  But too many ignored the limits, and so the virus spread.  And as it spread, more and more got sick, and more and more died.

That’s why God makes this creation story about limits, about the conditions of our freedom.  God is trying to tell us.  Living in the limits doesn’t limit your freedom.  Limits enable your freedom to thrive.  Years ago, I heard a story that helped me see that so clearly, I’ve used it often since.  So, if you think you’ve heard it before, you probably have.

Nicky Gumbel, a leader of a church in England, tells the story.  One afternoon, Nicky took his son to his soccer game.  But once there, they encountered a problem.   The kids had arrived, but not the referee.  So, for some bizarre reason, the parents roped in Nicky to be the referee instead.  But Nicky had several problems.  First, he didn’t have a whistle.  Second, since the kids weren’t wearing uniforms, he didn’t know which side was which.  And most crucially, Nicky didn’t really know the rules. 

So, as the game started, someone called the soccer ball out, and then another boy said, no, that ball was in.  But Nicky didn’t know.  So, what did he do?  He told the boys.  Play on.   And then another boy cried foul, but then the other kids said.  No, no one had committed a foul.  Again, Nicky didn’t know.  So, what did he do? He said, Play on.  After about a half hour. 4 kids had been injured.  Everybody had become totally frustrated.   And the game had disintegrated into complete chaos. Thankfully, when all seemed lost, the ref, who had got the time of the game wrong, arrived.   Nicky got mercifully fired.   The referee set everything in order.  And the kids had a great game. 

But do you see the point?  When the limits got ignored, when no one paid attention to the conditions of the game, what happened?  No one had the freedom to play anything.  The conditions, the limits gave them the freedom to play. And when the limits disappeared so did the freedom.

In many ways, that insight lies behind all the habits that we’ve been discussing over the last four weeks.   When Justin Earley out of desperation created these sets of habits that he called The Common Rule, he discovered that.  As he puts it in his book, Earley said.  “I had lived my whole life thinking that all limits ruin freedom, when all along it’s been the opposite: the right limits create freedom.”

 And these last two of the eight habits in the Habit point that out in some striking ways.  In the daily habit, Earley decided to shut off his phone for one hour a day.   And for his weekly habit, he decided to fast from something (in his case, food) for 24 hours each week.   In both cases, you take something good, food, and yes, these phones are good things, and you set limits on them, limits so that you can live more fully in the blessings they provide. 

 Now, here’s the irony of what happened when I tried to live in these limits.  For my whole life, I’ve struggled to develop a fasting practice, and for me, the fast did need to be food.  (Fasting as a practice doesn’t just need to be food, it can be anything with which you need to set a limit, anything that you might depend on a bit too much).  But I chose food because well, I love food sooo much.   And amazingly, I’ve been able to keep it up.  It’s never easy, but that fast day is always rewarding.   So, where is the irony?

 What I achieved with the weekly habit, I failed miserably at with the daily habit.  I just kept forgetting to turn my phone off for that hour.   And when I remembered, I didn’t do it.  I’d tell myself.  I need it on now, but I’ll turn it off later.  But later never came.  Only this week, have I gotten at all consistent in doing this.  And every time I’ve done it, turning it off has not come easy.   At times, I thought I had turned it off, when in reality I didn’t.  I had to consciously remember to do that last swipe that sent my phone into darkness.  And every time I did, I did not like it.  And I now know.  I find it easier to give up food for 24 hours, then to give up my phone for one.   And knowing that makes it even more clear, that I don’t own my phone so much, as my phone owns me.   It reminds me of why I need the freedom of that limit. 

 In this story, God is reminding you that if you want to live in freedom, then live in the limits.  Only there, will you find the conditions that truly free you. God may give you unconditional love, but God doesn’t give you unconditional freedom.  And why?  God does it for the same reason loving parents give their kids limits.  God loves you.   And God knows that only in the limits will you find the freedom you need. 

Interestingly enough, the very word that, in English, names us makes that clear, a word with roots in this story.   When you see the first person described as Adam, God isn’t giving you a name so much as a pun.  In this second creation story, how does God make this first person?  God makes him from the ground, or in Hebrew, the Adamah.   So, what does God call him?  God calls him the Adam. 

And in English, that word becomes the human.  For where does human come from?  It comes from the Latin word for the ground, humus.  So even our name, human, reminds us.  Human freedom has got to be grounded in the limits around us. In other words, to take another word from humus, freedom require you to have humility, to know your limits and live in them.  For if you lose touch with that humility, eventually, you will lose touch with your freedom as well.

And as you think about those limits, remember the limits that out of love, God took on for you.  In Jesus, God took on all the limits of human existence, and even more, suffered at the hands of our own limits.  In Jesus, God suffered the limitations of poverty and oppression.  He faced the limits of a broken religious system and an unjust government.  Yet even in those limits, he lived free, free to love without limit, even to death and beyond.  And because, you can know that God loves you like that, you can be free to live in the limits, to trust in them, knowing that only there in the grounding of his love, will you find the freedom to become all that God created you to be.