Keep you zeal, don’t burn out; keep yourselves fueled and inflamed. Be alert servants of the Master. Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Romans 12:11-12 from The Message
It’s hard to admit, but sometimes I tend to want others to make decisions that affect me, either because I don’t care or I’m uninformed. For example, when we are going out to dinner with others and they ask where we would like to go, I most often reply, “It really doesn’t matter to me” or in other words, “I don’t care.” I have never thought of that reply as being apathetic because most of the time I really don’t care, but in reality, I guess it is a pretty lame response.
Apathy is defined as “a lack of interest, enthusiasm or concern,” or in my case, a feeling of “I don’t care.” An anonymous source is quoted as saying, “Apathy is the glove in which evil slips its hard.” Elie Wiesel says of it, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference, and the opposite of life is not death, It’s indifference.”
The sad thing about apathy is that it doesn’t just affect the apathetic person, but it can affect all those around as well. The story is told of a little mouse who peeked out of his hole one day only to see a farmer and his wife taking a mouse trap out of a bag. He ran to the chicken, the lamb, and the cow to warn them of his impending danger, but each one responded apathetically since it did not directly affect them. That night a great noise revealed that a poisonous snake had been caught in the mousetrap! The wife tried to catch it, but the snake bit the wife, and she came down with a high fever. In order to comfort her, the farmer made a delicious soup, but he needed chicken to add to the recipe, so he took his knife and killed the chicken. Neighbors came to visit and lend support, but since there was no food to serve them, the farmer slaughtered the lamb to feed them. The wife died, and the husband had to sell the cow to cover expenses. The moral here is “the next time someone tells you about a problem and you don’t think it concerns you, think twice. He who doesn’t live to serve doesn’t serve to live.”
That story brought to mind the many times we as Christians pass by an opportunity to change the world because we are apathetic. We see people in this country pulling us further and further away from its roots and heritage, but it doesn’t affect us at the moment, so we don’t speak out. The country isn’t going bad because of the wickedness of the bad, but rather because of the apathy of the good.
Most of us are guilty of depending on others to provide a blessing to those around us who could really use it! Just like forty year old Isaac who let his father send out someone else to arrange for Rebekah to be his wife, we sometimes leave it to others to arrange and provide what we should be doing ourselves! We just don’t seem to want to be bothered! We don’t care!
Spiritual apathy can be seen in churches everywhere these days! People have begun to resort to acting like “grown children” who never have reached maturity in their relationship with God. They wait for someone else to do the things they should be doing for themselves. It seems to be a problem that doesn’t concern the masses.
The worst kind of apathy is that of discernment. These are those who accept whatever gossip they might hear in the grocery store, on the news, or in a community, and rather than seeking the truth, take the words as the truth or “drink the Kool-Aid”. First Thessalonians 5:21 commands us to “prove all things” which means we are to carefully examine the words we hear and its interaction in our lives. We all need a high level of discernment as to what we read, to whom we listen, what we watch, and with whom we associate. If we think something just couldn’t be true, we should be faithful to find out the truth!
There are apathetic people all around us who have caused casualties because of their “I don’t care attitude!” It might help us all to ask ourselves, “When was the last time I was involved in letting something wrong happen because I was apathetic?” “When did I accept something as truth without proving it?” “When did I let someone else do the work I should be doing?”
The will of God isn’t for us to develop an apathetic attitude but rather to make a daily commitment for that unto which God has called us!