Comments on: Managing Monday with Viktor E. Frankl – take 3 https://brianharrisauthor.com/managing-monday-with-viktor-e-frankl-take-3/ Tue, 05 Aug 2025 02:17:21 +0000 hourly 1 By: Brian Harris https://brianharrisauthor.com/managing-monday-with-viktor-e-frankl-take-3/#comment-6182 Tue, 07 Mar 2017 11:19:30 +0000 http://brianharrisauthor.com/?p=2460#comment-6182 In reply to Philip Renner.

Thanks Philip. The study you mention is most interesting. What does it mean for pastors and the challenge to put before people? I agree, we mustn’t just artificially create programs for adrenalin rushes. However, I wonder if we genuinely rediscovered the concept of vocation and calling if that would not provide purpose and challenge that is greater than most can manage. It is to rediscover how genuinely stretching the life to which we have been called, is. To often we are content to see our people strive for sanitized versions of what everone else is striving for, instead of helping them to gulp at the radically counter cultural call of the gospel… to put others first… to seek the Kingdom of God first… to say a radical “yes” to whatever Christ calls us to.

]]> By: Philip Renner https://brianharrisauthor.com/managing-monday-with-viktor-e-frankl-take-3/#comment-6179 Mon, 06 Mar 2017 22:33:23 +0000 http://brianharrisauthor.com/?p=2460#comment-6179 Thanks for sharing Brian. I was recently intrigued by a TED Talk about addiction, which proposed (based on evidence) addiction stems from a lack of something worth living for. One of the tests used rats in a cage, with two sources of water. One source was plain water, and the other laced with a drug. If the cage was plain and unadorned, the rats favoured the drugged water. If the cage was filled with engaging apparatus, the rats all went for the plain water. This was interpreted as showing lack of stimulation in life leads to a need to medicate our way through. This, among other examples (including human ones), contributed to the idea we are facing an increasingly ‘medicated’ society because it has lost connection to deep meaning. We look around and see the bars of a cage, and no meaningful stimulation (a challenge worthy of our efforts), and go shopping, or trawl the cafes, or get gaming, or searching the internet, or literally drug-taking. I wonder if Frankl might even go so far as to say that our easy access to the means to live is making life less worth living. What is ‘the good life’ without struggle? It is no wonder we can list adrenaline sports among the addictions of our age.
This is true in the church as much as outside it, and as a pastor, I feel deeply challenged by it. I would like your reflection if possible: what is the meaningful challenge we can set before Christians today, that can truly engage their life’s energies with God, without resorting to manufacturing projects for them. It is my concern that without a good answer to this, we are instead building an ethos of excellence coupled with new church programmes to distract people. I fear this approach is a substitute for showing how a ‘normal’ life with God can itself be deeply meaningful, challenging, and worth living, largely because such a vision is harder to demonstrate than ‘join this programme, and serve it well!’.

]]>