Our ConnectGroup from church gathered at our house for our first meeting of the semester last night. We are reading "The Cost of Control" by Sharon Hodde Miller. In the first chapter, Sharon explains that our desire for control is so strong, that if we don't have control in a situation, we have a tendency to create an illusion of control. That illusion may help to reduce anxiety in the short term, but if the illusion is not based in truth, the damage can be severe. One of the most graphic examples of this happened leading up to May 21st 2011. You may remember that as the day that the world was going to end - according to Harold Camping and his followers. Luckily for us, Harold's illusion did not come to fruition, and our world is still intact. There are at least two things unsettling about this. The first is that Harold had already been wrong once when he predicted the world would end in 1994. Apparently, people's memory was short. The second is that the Bible clearly states that we will not know when the world will end, so people making a claim that they know are misinformed. There were people who burned through their life savings expecting the world to end, and others that committed suicide when the story didn't unfold as Harold had predicted. Sharon promises to deliver solid advice on what we can do to manage our desire for control more effectively. I look forward to learning more.
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