I’m writing to you from my bed today…

No, I’m not ill, but when I attempted to get out of bed this-morning the “Start the Day” software prompted me to enter my “Get out of Bed” password, but I couldn’t remember it, and it wouldn’t let the sheets roll back.

I couldn’t remember the password because yesterday the software demanded that I select a new one, one with at least 36 characters including 16 symbols recognized by the Start the Day software as being “uncommon”, nine characters in both lower and upper case from at least three different oriental languages, and eight numbers whose product has a square root greater than five thousand but less than seventeen thousand and twenty-three.

The other day I was talking to someone at work about the state of our world, and I asked him what his ideal world would look like: how would things be in that hypothetical world of his making? (Have you ever tried to imagine a world with no hypothetical situations?). Being a gamer, and an extremely cynical kind of person too, his answer involved the hunting down and eradication of ninety-nine percent of the population of the planet, and the conversion of all remaining persons to the state of cyborg-including himself.

The discussion made me realize that I no longer had an idyllic world in my mind to play with. Oh, I believe in a heaven as surely as I believe in the earth, but for my unbelieving colleague, that’s “cheating” and irrelevant: it had to be a world where God either didn’t come into the equation, or where He had not yet intervened to bring about His own idyllic society.

I remember I had a dream world in my mind when I was a teenager and in my early twenties. It involved-I have to admit with some feeling of guilt and shame-the complete absence of human beings, apart from my one “true” lover, the girl who would bring me joy and fulfillment for all eternity. Not that everyone else had been “eradicated” by me or by anyone else-they just “weren’t there”.

Well, many years of reality has faded that little vision to the point of extinction. So, what would my utopia look like now?

Any efforts I may make to imagine a perfect world is hampered and clouded by the realization (and this is my thought but I’m sure I’m not the first to define it this way) that one man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia. Whatever may fit your perfect world may be an intense irritation to me. If you have your “great music” played at high volume everywhere in your world, I may just want to destroy that sound system at the earliest possible moment. My perfect scenery and urban layout may be hideously ugly to you. The Muslims would be fighting everyone else (sound familiar?); those attempting to meditate would be unhappy with the guys revving up their hot-rods, and dog lovers would be perpetually at odds with the cat lovers.

I have to say that I’m probably in the totally opposite camp to the humanist who believes that human nature is fundamentally good, and that given the right circumstances, people will come through to produce the kind of world we would all like to see. I can’t help popping that particular hypothetical bubble in no time at all with a multitude of realities, one insurmountable one being my own experience and observation of human nature. And my experience only agrees and confirms the very clear message of the Bible, which is that:

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9 KJV).

The need for ridiculously long passwords is only one of the multitude of evidences in support of the Bible’s teaching that we humans are incapable of saving ourselves from ourselves. We need someone bigger than our human nature. We need someone who isn’t plagued with fallen human nature, we need someone with much more power and imagination than we have, and we need someone who has a much greater utopia in mind than our own. We need Jesus Christ.

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