Links for the Weekend (2022-08-12)

Each Friday, I’ll post links to 3–5 resources from around the web you may want to check out.

Don’t (Always) Be Efficient

Efficiency is wonderful for jobs, but efficiency is terrible for relationships.

Who wants an efficient friendship? Or marriage? Who would want to visit an efficient park, or art museum? Who prefers drive-through fast food to a slow evening meal where the conversation lasts longer than the courses? It’s great to be efficient, but it’s not always great. Sometimes it’s better to be inefficient and let time slip away while we immerse ourselves in something (or someone) that isn’t a task to accomplish or a to-do box to tick.

How Job Teaches Us to Grieve With Hope

Marissa Bonduran writes about the choices we have when faced with sorrow and looks to the book of Job for guidance.

When Job said that the Lord gives and takes away, he acknowledged that all we experience has passed through the loving and purposeful hands of a trustworthy God. Throughout the rest of the book, Job continues to wrestle with what happened to him and what he knows is true about God. This is not an easy truth to grasp, but Job was willing to press into the Lord in search of the truth. As readers we watch his friends struggle with their own understanding of who God is. As we read the story of Job, there is much we can learn about how God works in our lives (Rom. 8:28).

How Connectivity Made Us Miserable

I appreciate Samuel James’s keen thinking about culture, technology, and faith. In this article he writes about Netflix, the iPod, and Facebook and the change they all underwent in the late 2000s. He argues that these changes have been working against our happiness since then.

Simply put, the idea that maximum access to the Internet, the utilization of all our culture and all our spaces to bring us closer to the ambient Web, has made our art less enjoyable, our relationships less accessible, and our experiences less meaningful. Americans today pay more money to get less out of their tools and less out of their art. Connectivity is making us miserable.

On the WPCA Blog This Week

This week on the blog we published an article written by Charissa Rychcik called Loving My Neighbor, Not Assuming the Worst. If you haven’t already seen it, check it out!

Note: Washington Presbyterian Church and the editors of this blog do not necessarily endorse all content produced by the individuals or groups referenced here.