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What is your favorite avoidance strategy? We all have them. Sometimes life just gets too much to handle. When the spring goes out of our step, a good avoidance behavior gives us the psychological space we need to recover. It allows us to recharge and tank up on the energy we need to tackle life’s challenges so we are at our best.

But what happens when life becomes all about avoidance? What happens when every day is filled with escape? What happens when one’s whole world begins to look and feel too much like the Artful Dodger?

Hours spent in front of the TV obviously signals avoidance. As one master of avoidance once confessed to the Rector, “TIVO is a nasty little machine.” NETFLIX suggests what an entrepreneur can do with a culture of avoidance. The world of computer games generated revenue of $32.6 billon in 2005. People who study this kind of thing claim revenue from computer games will double in the next 5 years.

Why engage a real world when a virtual world is so much less complicated?

Entertainment media obviously serves a consumer market hungering for distraction. But avoidance behaviors within the human experience range far and wide. They are not as obvious as grabbing a beer and popping a DVD in a machine.

Consider:

Work. The goal is to invest one’s time as a matter of responsible stewardship of one’s vocation. When work becomes a way to avoid life on its own terms, it is an avoidance strategy.

Church. The goal is to enter deeply into covenant relationship with God in a way that empowers relationships with one’s neighbor. When church becomes about defending doctrine or safe-guarding liturgy, it is an avoidance strategy.

Family. The goal is to create living space that forms human beings through the challenge of maintaining enduring relationships that lead to great health and wholeness. When family becomes a place to hide from engaging in the challenge of living in a broader community with others beyond the family, it is an avoidance strategy.

One observes the creative capacity of the human mind not only in how it finds innovative solutions to life’s challenges, but also in how it finds innovative ways to avoid life’s challenges.

Want to have some fun this week? Watch closely the people you know and love, as well as the people you hardly know.

Make a list of the avoidance strategies you observe. What do they do to avoid real engagement with real life?

Now sit down with the list. Circle the strategies you have observed in others that you also observe in yourself. What is everyone running away from?

“For whoever would save his life will lose it,” Jesus says. “And whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.”

The challenge to follow Jesus includes taking up one’s cross. How can one pick up a cross if one’s hands are filled with ways to avoid the life we have been promised in Christ Jesus?