I'm an information junkie. Are you?

I confess. I'm an information junkie. If I see part of a sporting event on TV, I want to know who won it, even if I've never seen the team, or individual, before. I listen to National Public Radio news programs a lot, and I often stay in the car after arriving at my destination, because I want to hear the rest of the story. I read a lot, on-line and in classical media. When the Watergate Hearings were on TV, I watched a lot of them. I didn't need to, but I wanted to. My wife and I have four information appliances in our home. I don't think we are ever actively using all four at once, but we often use two at a time, and occasionally three. Maybe you are like that. Maybe not. In this day of Twitter, texting while driving, libraries, magazine sales at the checkout counter, GPS devices, walking with earbuds in your ears, hundreds of TV channels, and lots and lots of on-line sites, including some apparently important ones that I've never heard of, a lot of people out there must be like that.

I guess I should stop and say that "information" has a technical meaning, or several such. I used an information appliance to look that linked source up, by the way.

Why am I like this? Why are you? I'm not sure. Part of it is that we need to know things for various reasons, such as to rear our children, do our job, study the Bible, converse with other people. Some of it must be that wanting to know things must be part of the image of God in us. Unfortunately, some of our information searching is sinful, however. Seeking out pornography, stealing someone's identity, finding out about things that we covet, when we don't need them, being a fan of the wrong sort of celebrity, seeking out stuff to gossip about, in various ways, are bending information hunger into wrong directions.

Am I ever going to see all of the sports events on TV, no matter how many channels I have at my disposal? Am I ever going to know all of the news being pumped out? Am I ever going to read all the books I've thought about reading? No. Neither are you.

Is that bad? Not necessarily. Most of the stories I can look at, in all kinds of media, have little value now. Almost none of them will have much importance ten years from now. Very, very few of them will have any importance in 2112.

There's a moral in that last paragraph. I need to pay attention to it. What's that moral? Ultimately, there's only one story that's of eternal importance. That's the story of Christ. He created, He sustains, He lived for us, died for us, was resurrected for us, and, by His death and resurrection, paid the penalty for our sins. He is now waiting for us. That story makes the Southeast Conference, National Public Radio, NBC, the local newspaper, all the magazines available at the supermarket, all the sites on the Internet, all the books in the library, all the tweets in cyberspace seem so insignificant that it's hardly worth paying attention to them, in comparison.

Thanks for reading. I hope that wasn't too much information!