Meltdown

Has anyone else watched and wondered about the spate of recent Hollywood meltdowns? It's with near morbid fascination that I daily tune into the latest Britney saga. Or Paris or Lindsay or any host of other starletts. It's like a train wreck and I just can't help but look.

How does one make such a mess of one's life? How do you get that far off course? Those who knew Ms. Spears early talk about how she was totally focused and goal driven and actually smart about how she approached things. I can't point to specific things she did or didn't do along the way because I've only recently followed her story. I've only seen the meltdown.

But generally speaking... tiny, incremental, almost imperceptible changes magnify themselves over time into completely altered lives. When these changes are good, we sometimes refer to them as course corrections and draw from the example of a large ship being guided by tiny movements at the helm. When the changes are bad, we find ourselves shocked at someone's "sudden" meltdown.

My friend, Brenda, describes these negative changes in terms of sin. She says, "first you hate it, then you tolerate it, then you embrace it." Sounds kind of trite on the surface, but think about it for awhile. There's a profound truth in there.

I think you could also describe it in terms of King David from the Bible. Now this guy had a meltdown of epic proportion! You know the story of lovely bathing Bathsheba? David should have been on the battlefield with his army not roaming around the castle spying on the neighbors. First bad choice. When he saw Bathsheba, he should have done the gentlemanly thing and turned away but he didn't. Second, and bigger, bad choice - he blew his chance to correct his course. Then he chose to act on his lust and to have her husband killed in a cover up... His choices just keep getting worse until David ends up loosing everything - most painfully the eternal blessings he'd been promised by God. Gotta hate that little catch about being faithful to the end. This is the same David who stepped out in youthful faith to take on the giant, Goliath, who had Israel's armies quaking in their boots. I think his story is one of the saddest in the Bible.

The whole thing leaves me pondering questions like... How do we know when we're making good decisions? What keeps us from correcting course when we don't? Why do we humans like the "rush" that comes from doing something risky?