Passion · Week 1 · Wednesday

Cooled by Degrees

Nobody in that house ever decided to stop praying. It simply stopped happening.

There was no argument about it. No crisis of faith, no offense at the church, nobody storming out of anything. Travel ball took a few Sundays, and then, over a couple of seasons, it took all of them. Everybody got a phone, at reasonable ages, for entirely reasonable reasons. The dinner table slowly turned into a place where four people sat together and looked at four screens. Then one ordinary night she did the math and realized that nobody had prayed out loud in that house since Thanksgiving, and she could not point to one single decision that had caused it.

There was no decision. That is the whole problem.

Cold Is Not an Event

Jesus said this would be the pattern, and He said it in a sentence most of us read straight past.

Read the verb again. Grow cold. Not get attacked. Not get stolen. Not get destroyed in a dramatic moment we could later point to and describe. Cold is not an event at all; cold is simply what happens when nothing is keeping the heat on. There has never in the history of the world been a fire that got hotter because everyone stopped tending it.

That is a sobering thing to accept about ourselves, and it is also enormously clarifying. We do not have a natural tendency toward heat that occasionally gets interrupted. We have a natural tendency toward cold that has to be actively interrupted. Which means the absence of any obvious problem in our spiritual life is not evidence that things are fine. It may only be evidence that the cooling has been quiet.

Notice too what Jesus attaches it to. Lawlessness increases, and love cools. He is describing an environment, not a personal failure. The temperature of the room around us actually does something to us. That should make us a great deal more thoughtful about what our families sit inside of for forty hours a week.

The Thing We Get Backwards About Desire

Here is where most of us have the diagnosis wrong. We assume the problem is that our hearts want too much, and so we treat desire itself as the enemy and try to want less. That approach fails, reliably, and it usually makes people brittle rather than holy.

Human beings are limited in nearly every direction. We are limited in time, in strength, in attention, in years. In one direction only we are effectively limitless, and that direction is wanting. We always want more. More time, more comfort, more respect, more of whatever the last thing was that almost satisfied us. That bottomless capacity is not a manufacturing defect. It is a mirror. We were built with an infinite capacity to desire because there is an infinite God with more to give than we could ever exhaust.

So the trouble was never the size of our wanting. The trouble is that we keep pointing all of it at things that have no capacity to hold it, and the modern world is engineered, deliberately and expensively, to keep us pointed that way. Every screen in the house is optimized by people who are very good at their jobs to capture exactly the appetite that God built for Himself. This is what makes it possible to feel completely full and completely cold at the same time, which is one of the strangest and most common conditions of our moment.

Which Is Why Peace Is the Test

Peace, in the biblical sense, is not a mood and it is not the absence of noise. It is being whole, complete, lacking nothing, content. That is the actual test to run on anything competing for our attention. Not is this sinful, but has this ever once left me whole. Nothing on a screen has ever delivered that, not because screens are uniquely evil, but because they were never built to carry the weight we hand them.

Turning the heat back on in a house is not complicated, and it is not a program. It is somebody deciding out loud that we are going to pray at this table again, tonight, badly, in front of everyone. It is a phone in a drawer during dinner. It is one Sunday reclaimed. None of that is impressive, and all of it is heat.

Nobody drifts into warmth. Not one person in history has cooled on purpose, and not one person has warmed up by accident.

Burn long, not just bright.

Tomorrow · Come Out of Hiding