Urgency

Anyone halfway decent when it comes to sales or marketing will tell you that in order to make the potential customer pull the trigger, in order to get them to hand over their hard-earned money, you need to create a sense of urgency. Whether it’s limited quantity or a twenty-four-hour sale, there is a subconscious switch that gets flipped in many a brain, and acquiring the thing that is in limited supply, or getting it for the discounted price only available on that day becomes paramount.

 There’s a furniture store in our neck of the woods that has been having going out of business sales for the better part of a decade now, and every once in a while they’ll sprinkle in a twenty-four-hour blowout, just for fun.

We are hardwired to react to the sense of urgency. This is why televangelists insist that you pick up your phone now, right now. Don’t wait until tomorrow or the day after. They know that if you don’t react to their pitch within a certain window of time, chances are you’ll go on to other things, or come to your senses about putting a donation for a new private jet on your credit card.

Same goes for late-night infomercials which tell you that the first hundred callers get an extra special bonus prize, even though that same infomercial has been running for the better part of the new millennium. Either they’re just burning money running ads that no one responds to, and they haven’t hit that magic first hundred caller benchmark yet, or something is fishy in Copenhagen.

Why is it, I wonder, that we react so predictably to faux urgency, yet are altogether disinclined to show the same tendencies toward things that matter?

I understand that part of it, perhaps not a small part, has to do with coercion, but there are certain things in life that we ought to innately prioritize due to their importance.

Even though some folks can’t seem to live without the magic slicer, a junky piece of plastic that will likely spend many a year in the back of a drawer, untouched and unused, they’re perfectly comfortable with not giving serious thought to their spiritual man, eternity, and the hereafter.

The flippancy with which some people wave off such topics, rolling their eyes and muttering whatever will be will be, or it will all pan out in the end, is frightening and disconcerting to behold.

Perhaps we’ve downplayed the reality of hell for so long that people no longer feel a sense of urgency when it comes to eternity. Perhaps we’ve sugarcoated everything to such extremes, that people have come to believe all souls go to heaven, and everyone can pick one favorite pet to bring along.

The household of faith has failed at relaying the urgency of it all, even though this particular urgency is neither manufactured or imagined. We have failed at driving home the point that all flesh is like grass and all the glory of man as the flowers of the grass. We are vibrant and full of life but for a season, then wither, destined to return to the earth to whence we came.

There is no fountain of life, magic elixir, or immortality potion. Though many are searching for these things, it is a fool’s quest at best. There is but one way, one truth, and one life, and all must enter in while they still have breath. When we are dust, it is too late. If that doesn’t create a sense of urgency in those not yet regenerate, nothing will. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.