Outsourcing

Modern technology is rapidly outsourcing our knowledge across all areas of our lives.

Personally, we have outsourced phone numbers to our cell phones, email addresses to our contact lists, knowing streets and directions to Mapquest and GPS, child-rearing to television and day-care, dating to matchmaking sites, musical ability to recorded performers, cooking and hospitality to restaurants, playlist selection to smart shuffle or Pandora, sleep to Starbucks, entertainment to movies and television, friendships to Facebook, Twitter and blogs, and of course all general knowledge to Google and Wikipedia.

Professionally, driving to work is replaced by calling in to meetings, talking to clients is replaced by email, scheduling to our digital calendars, getting up and walking 30 feet to instant messenger, calculations to excel, report making to macros, and any aspect that is not your core job to someone else.

The lists go on and on leaving almost no area of our lives untouched. The great offload. All of this makes work and social life vastly more efficient. We can do many times more than what we have ever been able to accomplish before, because it just takes less work to get things done in the world. However, there are several areas where the level of effort required cannot decrease or may even need to increase in the face of such a rapidly moving world.

Any knowledge which is not purely informational is partly experiential and cannot be outsourced. This includes but is not limited to intuition or any type of personal relationship. Perhaps more importantly, you cannot outsource any sort of personal development. Any experience that you want to impact you, any knowledge that you want to change your personality, or anything that you want to affect your way of thinking cannot be outsourced to another person. You must do and learn them personally.

So now as this applies to class: we can't outsource the disciplines and the study of Christ. It falls into all of these categories. We can't rely on a Pastor to be our Google search, pulling all of the important bits right to front so that we can download them on Sunday morning. We can't count on a peer review of theology or practice to point us to the things which we need to grow in. We are unique, distinct individuals, and we must learn to walk personally with our Lord.

(This thought came to me while we were in class and John and Emily knew the scriptures that David was trying to reference)