Taking the Initiative Against Daydreaming

    From My Utmost for His Highest

Arise, let us go from here —John 14

I’m glad the Chambers’ chose to rally against the great destructive force of daydreaming in our culture. This must not be allowed to continue, right?

At first, I didn’t get why daydreaming was adverse to Jesus, today. I really didn’t. What’s the harm in daydreaming?

Daydreaming is a short-term detachment from one's immediate surroundings, during which a person's contact with reality is blurred and partially substituted by a visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced while awake. Chambers preached this sometime early in the 1900s and the more I looked into it, the more I realized that it was written more for us today than then. And likely more for me than you.

In order to take initiative against it, we must first understand that the real danger of daydreaming is…

…the detachment that we feel from reality. Norman Herr is a professor of Science Education at Cal State. He’s aggregated studies (there are over 4,000 of them) indicating television viewership and it’s too frightening to share. If you’re brave, you can see them here.

My struggle, at times, is video games. Not big complex ones, but small dumb ones. Puzzles like Minesweep, Solitaire and Candy Crush (that one’s really embarrassing), lull me into a state of detachment and give me the fantasy of accomplishment.

Here are four main points for further discussion, below (quotes are from My Utmost for His Highest):

1. Daydreaming is a distraction from the real focus we’re to have at hand. “…Jesus never allowed idle daydreaming.”
2. The real burden of detachment is not born on the dreamer, but those who love them. “If you are in love with someone, you don’t sit and daydream about that person all the time— you go and do something for him.”
3. God doesn’t really work with daydreams. “But when our inclination is to spend time daydreaming over what we have already been told to do, it is unacceptable and God’s blessing is never on it.”
4. Daydreams are counter to prayer. “Allow Him to be the source of all your dreams, joys, and delights, and be careful to go and obey what He has said.”

When calculated in dollars and minutes, things I say are important can be miles apart from the things I show are important. This is burned onto the hearts of those closest to me in return for nothing except less time that I had when I began. No success digitally, or emotion pulled from film or season fully watched will propel me if I’ve done so at the expense of those I love.

Jerry Leachman said, “You can fake caring, but you can’t fake showing up.” [Tweet Yea!]

Amusement. A: from or away. Muse: meaning to be absorbed in thought or an instant of reflection. America, it seems, is amusing itself to death. In the end, who can really say that the things we ingest (read, watch, eat, hear) have no bearing on our hearts? [I’d Tweet that!] They always bring us closer to what we truly love, even if we hate it.

Truly, “Arise, let us go from here,” and resolve to make our truth beat love.

I love you.

#truthbeatslove