ADDICTED TO NOVELTY

There’s a line in “Night at the Museum 2” where Dr. McPhee says that people like something just because it’s the new thing.

There is a very subtle temptation in the kinds of work that are called helping careers (this can include medicine, psychology, politics, even ministry). I call it the need to be needed.

But I'd like to talk about another subtle temptation that faces people who are involved with endeavors that require communication & creativity. That temptation is the need to be praised by others for coming up with something new or novel.

A couple observations about novelty. First, like the Bible says in the Book of Ecclesiastes, there really is “nothing new under the sun.” When someone comes up with something new, it’s not a creation. It’s only a discovery or re-discovery of something that was there all along. God is the only real creator. We get in trouble when we do what Tom Hanks does in “Castaway” when he says, “Look what I have made! I have made fire!”

Another observation is that not every novel thing is good, true, or worthwhile. Sometimes things take a long time to come up with simply because everybody before already knew that it wasn’t a bright idea. A good example is the many social experiments our government seems bent on forcing on people who have a lot more common sense derived from living in the real world.

One of the negatives of social media, especially in this political season, is that too many people want to come up with nuances & novelties, simply so they can think of themselves as the smartest guy in the room.

In our Christian experience & understanding, we have to be especially careful. The Holy Spirit gets the credit for a lot of ideas & experiences that people claim originated with Him. But maybe they didn't.

Rather than getting pulled into this kind of addiction to novelty, it’s better to see ourselves as King David saw himself according to Psalm 131:

O Lord, my heart is not proud, nor my eyes haughty; nor do I involve myself in great matters, or in things too difficult for me.

Surely I have composed and quieted my soul;

Like a weaned child rests against his mother, my soul is like a weaned child within me.

O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forever.