Beyond Common Sense..

By Author: Terry Dashner
Total Articles: 94
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The Limits of Common Sense

Terry Dashner.Faith Fellowship Church PO Box 1586 Broken Arrow, OK 74013

I was taught to value common sense. My roots are small town, lower middle-class American from the heart of America—Oklahoma. My dad was a WWII veteran who had seen action in the South Pacific and claimed he made it through the war by the grace of God and his ability to use his natural wits. My Mother was from a family of nine brothers and sisters, who grew up in a country home without electricity and without indoor facilities. They had a path-and-a-half that led to an outhouse, a good distance from the house.

Pragmatism was honorable and the way to make it in the rough-and-tumble world outside. Pragmatism was known by many names in the Dashner home—good-ole-common-horse-sense, good-sense, level-headedness, and common-smarts, to name some of the more commonly used. And much pride went into addressing the pundit's paradoxes, the intellectual's conundrums, and academia's curricula with a home-spun wisdom that kept life simple. After all, isn't life supposed to be simple?

Through ...
... the years my pragmatism has rescued me, on more than one occasion, while serving in the military and municipal law enforcement. I'm glad for my contributions to country and community by way of the common man's wit. But to be perfectly honest, I must admit that there is more to living than just being practical. Listen please.

I agree with Socrates. Our most practical need in life is to be more than a pragmatist. I believe the words of Jesus who said that man shall not live by bread alone. Yes, there is more to living than bread. As a matter of fact, Jesus also said that it would profit man very little to gain the whole world—all it offers—and lose his own soul. Or in other words, man was created for a higher purpose. Man should not live by his natural wits alone, while ignoring the deeper issues of life beyond this life.

One of my favorite authors is Peter Kreeft. The professor says, A standard joke-shop item is the little black box: when you move the lever from ‘off' to ‘on', it whirrs, blinks a red light, and opens a trap door in its top, allowing a hand to come out and shut its lever off, then drop back into the box. Every part of the box is practical—it has a purpose beyond itself—the battery sends energy along the wire; the wire takes it to a gear; the gear turns; it opens the top; and so on—but there is absolutely no reason or purpose to the box as a whole. That is why it is so funny.

But a life like that, a life composed only of practical things that serve some other end but with nothing in it worth having for its own sake—the true, the good, the beautiful—such a life is not funny but pitiful.

That truth smacks some of us between the eyes. We are going about life, minding our own business, paying our dues, and priding ourselves as to our pragmatism. But there is nothing more to us. We aren't reaching beyond ourselves into thoughts of eternity. We don't deal with that because it's complicated and stresses our comfort zones of practicality. To really know yourself, you must seek wisdom. And wisdom is beyond you. It is in God alone.

If we do not look beyond appearance and seek out the true reality, we are cowards and living only for today. If we are satisfied with only what makes us happy, we will never know whether we are being deceived about who we are and what level of our being is being satisfied, states Kreeft. It's something to think about.

Keep the faith. Stay the course. Jesus is coming soon.

Pastor Tdash


About the Author Writes daily devotions for his congregation.