More Thoughts on "New"

I recently posted some concerns with all things new. Our culture is consumed with emphasizing new, young, beautiful, the latest, greatest, WOW, "now with added value bleach." If you do not believe this, think about the last time you saw a middle-aged, elderly, homely or overweight person in a reality television show, or as a contestant on a game show. You would think that everyone in America is young and beautiful.

Well, as is often the case, I am not done. I have some more concerns with what the world considers new. Isaiah 43.19 declares that God is doing a new thing. For that very reason we need to be sure that we do not eliminate everything new out of hand. We do not want to miss what God is doing. But at the same time, we must be careful to not over-emphasize new things at the expense of our traditions, values and history.

• Focusing on new things causes us to lose sight of our traditions, our culture, the very things that make us who we are. When we are only looking for what is new, we will forget where we came from.
• New things could cause us to repeat the mistakes of the past. When we forget what we have learned, we may well mess up again.
• Being consumed with new things makes us produce new things more frequently and more quickly. This automatically diminishes the value we place on new things and the quality that the new things represent.
• Finally (I think), the new promotes only surface interest in everything. When we have tradition, we live with music, art, literature and life over and over again. We can truly see the value and the depth of a thing when we spend time with it.

I am sure that there is more. I am not ready to eliminate the new, but I definitely refuse to throw away what has been tried, tested and established through the years.