On building castles in the sand

I’ve always had a good imagination. Not that cool, creative dragons and unicorns kind of imagination, that could help me to be some kind of literary genius, but the sort of tragic kind. The kind that found me sitting on the floor of my room as a kid and suddenly realizing I was crying my eyes out because I’d imagined my parents had just died in a car accident and I was all alone.

As I’ve become older I’ve realized that my imagination combined with my slight control-freakish nature finds me lapsing regularly into fantasy. Imagining future scenarios and how I would act and what I would say and what-would-I-do-if-this-happened-and-they-said-this etc. etc.

God spoke to me about this recently. I’d worked myself into a bit of a state over something that was almost entirely in my head and all of a sudden God showed me what I was doing:

You’re building a castle in the sand, Sarah, and you’re planning on living in it.

That’s exactly (metaphorically) what I was doing. The scenarios in my head had little grounding in reality. I was constructing a falsified world, one that would be swept away with the next tide… and I’d been planning on living in it.

Following the apostle Paul’s instructions to think only on ‘whatever is true’ is something I find insanely hard, but I know it’s something I need to work on.

Who Tells the Creators of Technology When to Stop?

I’ll admit it. I’m as guilty as the next person when it comes to being glued to my phone. Yes, I’m distressed when I look around at a group of friends out to dinner and see them all on their phones, but what can I say? I do it too.

What really gets me though is that I know I don’t need it. Somewhere, deep in a drawer, is my old Nokia 3315. Gosh I loved that phone. It did everything I needed it to, and for years I refused to upgrade, until eventually I did, because everyone had, and somehow that created a need.

Technology changes lives, saves lives and improves lives, but like many things that can be used for good, it can also be just plain bad.

Companies, driven by the desire for money and success, create, improve and reinvent. And like lemmings we lap it up. We pour out our hard earned cash to buy the newest thing, because it’s new.

We don’t need it, but the very fact that everyone buys it creates a need.

There is no accountability; no one who looks at new technology and asks: Will this be truly beneficial for society in the long run? They just create and we consume.

Could we be lining our graves because we follow without thinking, people who are creating without thinking, and there is no one to tell them when enough is enough?