Leaving behind the God-sized world...

to live a me-sized life.

Jason

Jul 01, 2025

Its weight will crush you if you try to hold it.

Its immensity will rip you apart if you try to contain it.

Its thirst will bleed you dry of tears if you weep for it.

Its hunger will devour your soul if you feast upon it.

Its endlessness will take the time of your life if you work to reach it.

Its humanity will produce inhumanity if you care for just a bit of it.

So goes the way of us against the world and its continual horrors.

In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis writes:

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy…

And this was before the internet, social media, the 24/7 news cycle that funnels the fear, anger, anxiety, and hatred from around the world that simmers amidst 8.2 billion people, and the list goes on…

If Lewis saw a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy back in the hustle and bustle of 1941, what are now?!?

I was raised on the news, and into adulthood I was a news junkie. I came to work in the military intelligence community where you lived and died in even more news than makes the news.

It has only been recently, in the crescendo of the news cycle, and the stretching of my empathy to face it all, that I’ve truly come face-to-face with the echoing thought springing forth from the cracks within me. It paraphrases a line from a great song:

You’re only human after all.
You’re only human, after all.

Currently, there are 196,800,000,000 hours in a day.

That is, there are 22,465,753 years in a day.

Wait, that doesn’t make sense! What the hell am I talking about?

With an estimated 8.2 billion people on Earth right now, over the course of 24 Earth hours:

There are nearly 200 billion human hours being lived
There are almost 22.5 million human years passing

And we have created platforms to glean and deliver into our lives, for our constant consumption, the worst and most fake of it all.

And I see in others, and I have personally experienced, the disconnect from the immediate world in front of us, as we attempt to fit lifetimes into palm-sized seconds.

The question is begged: are we meant to feed into our lives the news and doings of approximately 308,000 daily lifetimes in this world? Or would (is?) such a feat destructive to a single human being?

Can a human plug into a world of pain and fraud and still be who God designed them to be?

What if the weight of the world is only for God to hold?

What if our human limitations require us to cease our consumption of more than we can handle, lest we become inhuman in the overwhelming of our senses?

I don’t know. I don’t see myself as an expert on the matter, but simply a victim.

Each person must simply answer for and to themselves. And what is healthy for one is not necessarily healthy for another!

For those who are intrigued by these thoughts…

For those whose hearts or minds are piqued to this point…

For those who resonate with a life overwhelmed…

I invite you to consider a reduction of hours lived.

Give the inhuman weight of this entire world over to superhuman power.

Let the sun set on your day, rather than chasing it over the horizon.

Dallas Willard spoke of solitude “well practiced” - that is, solitude that does not harm us just as much as the overwhelming daily company of 8.2 billion people. And he spoke of silence as the completion of solitude.

Often, we feel silence is intended to be the space we create to hear from God, where we have been neglecting him and his voice. But silence can also be the space where we can finally hear ourselves. In silence, we may suddenly hear the screams of our own souls, as they have been crying out in need. A pleading for help that was lost beneath the roar of the world.

Reduce your hours. The bare minimum we each face is 24 hours a day. Start from there, and add your circles. And then protect your circles!

None of this is to be legalistic!

Solitude for some is backpacking into the woods. Solitude for others is with five of their best friends. And for another, solitude is getting lost in a crowd.

Silence for some is the sound vacuum of noise-canceling headphones. For others, it is the silence of everything else, except a child, because in the child’s play and laughter, they hear God. And for others, silence is found riding atop a favorite song or an ocean’s surf.

You know you.

The dilemma we face in modern times is the opposite of the ancient world - eager to discover what was over the horizon and across the ocean. Now we know… all the time…

Ours is a challenge of reduction.