The Right Obsession

The Art of Unlearning, Chapter 7, Part 5

During a 2015 performance of the Broadway play Hand to God, a young member of the audience became alarmed when he realized his cell phone was about to run out of power. He noticed an outlet on the stage and thought he could climb up on stage and plug in his phone. He must have thought no one would notice but of course everybody did. There were boos, cat calls, and a momentary interruption. Veteran theater-goers knew it was a fool’s errand to begin with—the outlet was part of a stage prop; it wasn’t even connected to any power.

We live in a day and age where we are slowly tempted to become obsessed with battery life. If you ask me at any given hour of the day, I could offer a fairly accurate estimate of how much battery life is left on my iPhone or iPad. If I’m having dinner at a close friend’s house, I might even ask to plug in my phone while we eat. At church ‘green rooms,’ one of my first glances is to find an open outlet to recharge my iPad between teaching sessions.

Would that we were as obsessed with brain power as we are with battery power. If we understand the invitation behind Solomon’s glorious challenge, we’d recognize the need to attend to our intellectual fitness. Yet many of us miss the every deepening glory of life in Christ because our priorities lie in different places, We don’t value wisdom and understanding as Solomon does, thinking that they are worth more than everything else we have. We’re more concerned what the scale tells us about our weight, what our 401(k) statement (or the absence of one) tells us about our net worth, what Netflix tells us is available to stream, or how much power is left in our latest gadget than we are with increasing our mental firepower with increased understanding.

In light of that, let me give you one more motivation to embrace abundance via the path of reading: if you’re been negligent at all in this regard, you might have a very pleasant surprise ahead of you—a brand new you with a vastly increased influence.