How to Recognize When You're Living Like a Boiling Frog
Do you feel it?
Somedays I feel it and some days I don't.
The slow boil of our culture reminds me of a hot tub.
I know I have fallen asleep many times and slipped under the water only to be awakened by the rush of warm water into my nostrils.
People who are still in rebellion against God often find comfort in the slow boil, after all, what else is there?
But as Christians we are called upon to not be of this world, to not let our sinful natures dominate all we do.
The Church is all of us and not just the pastor and staff.
American Christians have been giving ground to our sinful secular culture for decades now. The de-churching of America is fact in our face.
Pleasing people and entertainment have long been the consumer mentality of many churches. Worshipping, honoring, and fearing God, learning to live a Holy life has been replaced by a cultural Christianity of subtle design.
So we toil and we boil trying to work harder for Jesus yet we do not know Him!
How do we know we are boiling?
Take it for granted that for the most part, you are!
Consider how much time you actually spend in prayer, in relationship with Christ.
The war we fight is everywhere but it is not ours to win. Christ won and defeated evil. Our problem is in our sin we continue to choose it.
In the substack article below Catherine Shannon discusses how we are numbing out to life and some solutions.
Everyone is Numbing Out by Catherine Shannon
It’s easy to identify the presence of something, but it’s much harder to identify the absence of something. If your boyfriend brings you flowers, that’s awfully nice. If he never brings you flowers, it might take you a while to notice. Maybe you do eventually notice, but you decide to cope. You tell yourself you don’t care about getting flowers. Maybe you take it a step further: “Actually, flowers are really basic and lame. Only basic girls like flowers. I’m a cool girl and cool girls don’t care about getting flowers.”
If this goes on for long enough—even if you are genuinely presented with flowers at some point—you will see them as a kind of joke. Flowers are now a bit. It sounds so trivial, I know, but if you dull your “receptors for flowers” for years on end, you will eventually fail to see the beauty of the gesture.
"Entering the void
I’m deeply troubled by the fact that I see this happening at a massive scale, all around us. Except the problem is not a lack of bouquets, of course. It’s a lack of meaning.
Life has gotten very chaotic incredibly quickly. It has become increasingly difficult to parse anything from the static. People started coping with this lack of meaning through a kind of ironic detachment (which is very much still around), but it has matured into a pervasive cultural apathy, a permeating numbness. This isn’t nihilism per se. (Even nihilists have a sincere belief system; they just sincerely believe that life is meaningless.) What we’re dealing with is worse than nihilism. People are checking out of life in their 20s and 30s without reaching any profound conclusions about the point of it all.
“People are so worn down,” my friend told me on a recent phone call. She’s right: there’s a real lack of palpable ambition and vitality these days, a stunning lack of life force in the world. Another friend told me that “this has been going on for so long that people wouldn’t know meaning if it walked up and bit them in the ass.” It’s true—so many of the things that once gave the average person’s life real meaning are now treated with sarcasm and contempt: college is a waste of money, work is a waste of your life, getting married is just a piece of paper, having kids is a nightmare, family is a burden, hobbies are merely quaint, earnestly expressing yourself is cringe, leaving the house is exhausting, religion is for idiots, the list goes on. If you allow yourself to internalize this perspective, eventually everything becomes a dumb joke..." from the article: Everyone is Numbing Out by Catherine Shannon
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