Anizor Overcoming Apathy

Gospel Hope for Those Who Struggle to Care
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4335-7883-0
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

Understanding Apathy and How to Combat It For many Christians, apathy can feel inescapable. They experience a lack of motivation and a growing indifference to important things, with some even struggling to care about anything at all. This listlessness can spill over into our spiritual lives, making it difficult to pray, read the Bible, or engage in our communities. Have we resigned ourselves to apathy? Do we recognize it as a sin? How can we fight against it? In Overcoming Apathy, theology professor Uche Anizor explains what apathy is and gives practical, biblical advice to break the cycle. Inspired by his conversations with young Christians as well as his own experiences with apathy, Anizor takes a fresh look at this widespread problem and its effect on spiritual maturity. First, he highlights the prevalence of apathy in our culture, using examples from TV, movies, and social media. Next, he turns to theologians, philosophers, and psychologists to further define apathy. Finally, Anizor explores causes, cures, and healthy practices to boldly overcome apathy in daily life, taking believers from spiritual lethargy to Christian zeal. This short ebook is an excellent resource for those struggling with apathy as well as parents, mentors, and friends who want to support someone in need. - Examines the Individual and Cultural Experience of Apathy: Analyzes the concept, experience, and healing from apathy; explores influences from philosophers to pop culture to understand its nature  - Practical Steps for Dealing with Apathy: Identifies 7 causes as well as healthy habits to fight against indifference - Accessible for Students and Mentors: A great guide for high school and college students and those who counsel them; youth and young adult pastors; teachers; and anyone struggling with apathy or who knows someone who is

Uche Anizor (PhD, Wheaton College) is professor of theology at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. His other books include Overcoming Apathy and How to Read Theology.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Anizor, Uche

Leseproben

1

A Show about Nothing

Our Culture of Apathy

Imagine you died and your children discovered your secret journals—what would they find within? What would surprise them? What themes would stick out to them? In my case, I think my kids would be overwhelmed by the number of entries in which I prayed the same kind of prayer: “Lord, wake me up!”

I became a Christian when I was eighteen, after wrestling with the fear of death for some time. I met Jesus through reading the Gospel of Matthew in a King James Bible given to me as a birthday gift. Reading of Jesus’s character, seeing his love in action, and encountering for the first time his promises of eternal life were absolutely transformative. Without hearing a formal “gospel presentation,” I was powerfully drawn to him. I decided in the course of my reading that I wanted to follow this man for the rest of my life. I finally found hope.

My early days as a Christian were marked by youthful zeal. I remember taking forty-five-minute walks home from high school, rather than hopping on the school bus, just so I could stop at the local Christian bookstore (remember those?) to browse books about the Bible. I’d chitchat with the store manager, asking question after question about good books to read. I had a hunger to know things I knew nothing about. When I got home from school, I’d scurry up to my room for time alone with God, the Bible, and whatever book I had picked up from the shop. Everything was different.

Or so I thought.

It didn’t take long for me to feel in my gut that something wasn’t right about my Christian life. I noticed a war raging inside of me. On the one hand, I had a strong desire for learning, truth, knowledge, understanding. On the other hand, I had started to feel “blah” about prayer, people, and other things that are supposed to matter to Christians.

This two-sidedness, or (better) double-mindedness, plagued me into my twenties. In college, I got involved with a campus ministry that was committed to helping Christians grow and to teaching them how to share their faith with others. While being a part of this group was fantastic in many ways, it also exacerbated my troubles. There’s nothing worse than being around a bunch of passionate and sincere people when you don’t feel very passionate about things you know you should care deeply about.

Much to my shame, several times when I was sharing the gospel with fellow students, I found myself wanting the experience to be over. Keep in mind, most spiritual conversations I had on campus were friendly. It was rare to have a stressful, antagonistic gospel encounter. Yet, I wanted them to end—not all the time, but enough times to give me pause.

In my mid- to late twenties, I sat in church services countless times daydreaming or waiting for the preaching to end. It had nothing to do with the quality of the preaching—I’ve been around a lot of good preaching. Instead, there was something askew in my affections. I lacked passion.

In time, I would come to hate the word passion! But I couldn’t fault those who had it. I was convinced they were on to something. Jesus’s rebuke to the churches in Ephesus encapsulated how I felt about my Christian life, even in those early days: “I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first” (Rev. 2:4).

I was lame and lukewarm. So on top of filling journals with prayers of longing, I took up writing songs of desperation. A few verses from one song sheepishly exclaimed the theme that pervaded my journals:

Wake me up, I don’t know that I’m sleeping,

Wake me up ‘cause I’m dead unawares;

Wake me up ‘cause I’ve fallen asleep,

And I don’t care.

Wake me up ‘cause my life seems a duty,

Wake me up ‘cause I can’t mean a prayer;

Wake me up ‘cause I can’t see Your beauty,

And I don’t care.

This song summed up my twenties: apathy mixed with longing and a tinge of guilt.

Making Indifference Fashionable

Roughly coinciding with my becoming a Christian was the advent of Seinfeld. No TV show before or since has captivated me as much as this quirky sitcom from the 1990s. My Thursday nights were built around catching the latest episodes. I had never seen a show so clever, creative, and consistently hilarious. I wasn’t alone in my love for the sitcom. During its last five seasons, 30 million or more viewers tuned in weekly, with the finale garnering around 76 million viewers. It is regularly cited as one of the best shows of all time and has remained a cultural phenomenon since going into syndication.

The brilliance of the show’s concept was portrayed in a key episode in season four, where Jerry (played by Jerry Seinfeld) and George (played by Jason Alexander) discuss writing a TV show pilot episode for NBC. As they consider what the show might be about and exchange some typically witty banter, George timidly suggests, “This should be the show. This is the show.”

Jerry: What?

George: This. Just talking.

Jerry: Yeah, right.

George: I’m really serious. I think that’s a good idea.

Jerry: Just talking? What’s the show about?

George: It’s about nothing.

Jerry: No story?

George: No, forget the story.

Jerry: You gotta have a story!

George: Who says you gotta have a story?

As the conversation goes on and Jerry remains bewildered by the concept, he exclaims in a frustrated voice, “I still don’t know what the idea is!”

George: It’s about nothing!

Jerry: Right.

George: Everybody’s doing something. We’ll do nothing.

Jerry: So, we go into NBC, we tell them we got an idea for a show about nothing?

George: Exactly.

Jerry: They say, “What’s your show about?” I say, “Nothing.”

George: There you go!

[Pause . . .]

Jerry: I think you may have something here.1

This scene was a bit of an inside joke. The show’s writers were giving the audience a behind-the-scenes glimpse into how Seinfeld and the sitcom’s cocreator, Larry David, came up with and pitched the show. Though this may not have been the writers’ intention, this scene suggested that a key to understanding the actual show (not the imaginary pilot) was to recognize that it was a “show about nothing.”

Many fans latched on to the idea that Seinfeld was a show about nothing. The writers were onto something. A show about nothing was quite unique—uncharted waters even. But was Seinfeld really a show about nothing?

The show’s unofficial motto, “No hugging, no learning,” coined by David, highlighted its nose-thumbing attitude toward previous TV and societal conventions. It was not a show about nothing per se, but a show about insignificant, petty things. It was a show that normalized indifference toward big, meaningful things (such as marriage, family, religion, social concern, even the Holocaust) and a fixation on life’s daily minutia (such as getting a good parking spot, the annoyance of “close talkers,” and maintaining one’s high score in Frogger).

Indifference was the name of the game.

Nothing captured this theme like the series finale. While waiting around in the small fictional town of Latham, Massachusetts, the show’s four main characters witness an overweight man getting carjacked. Rather than jumping to his aid, they sit back and mock him about his weight, video record the assault taking place, and then walk away. The victim notices their mockery and inaction, and eventually reports them to the officer on the scene. The four are then arrested for violating what is known as the “Good Samaritan Law,” a statute requiring bystanders to respond in situations when others are in danger.

A lengthy and highly publicized trial ensues. The prosecutors call in witness after witness (characters from several previous episodes) to demonstrate that the main characters’ inaction toward the carjacking victim is just one example among many of their poor character.

Finally, the judge calls on the jury to read its verdict on the charge of “criminal indifference.” The jurors find Jerry and his friends guilty. But it is the judge’s closing statement that captures the truth about Seinfeld that its writers and viewers have known (or at least felt) all along. He declares, “I don’t know how or under what circumstances the four of you found each other, but your callous indifference and utter disregard for everything that is good and decent has rocked the very foundation upon which our society is built.”

They are sentenced to one year in jail. The series ends with the four friends sitting in a jail cell, more or less indifferent to their consequences, chitchatting about the location of George’s shirt button—which, not coincidentally, is the very thing he and Jerry talked about in the opening scene of the very first episode—among other insignificant things.

Thus concluded one of the best shows of all time, a show that ended as it began, with none of the characters really having grown as...