Slip Slidin’ Away: The Fear of Falling Behind

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My parents’ scare tactic for encouraging their five children to study was that if we didn’t, we could wind up being “ditch diggers.”

That occupation was relatively rare even in my childhood when mechanized digging was being introduced but my parents undoubtedly heard that advice from their parents when such jobs were common. The equivalent today may be “slinging burgers at McDonald’s.”

No matter how you express it, few things worry humans more than the fear of “not keeping up,” of falling behind others in the economic and social rankings we keep in our heads. Much of contemporary advertising is based on this idea. Successful people drive nice cars, take great vacations and choose food and medicines that make them active, healthy and happy. Buy our product and you can be among them.

A woman interviewed after the recent Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, in which voters decided to leave the European Union, said many believed the union was keeping them from economic success.  “It shows that there are people that are definitely not coming up with others,” she said, “people that feel like they are being left behind.” 

This fear of falling behind brings to mind a song written and recorded by Paul Simon in 1977 called Slip Sliding Away. It appears to be about the inability of people to meet goals in their family lives, love lives, economic lives and lives in general. It can also be interpreted to refer to the rapidity with which we approach death. The chorus is,



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“Slip slidin' away
Slip slidin' away
You know the nearer your destination
The more you're slip slidin' away.”

And Simon throws in a bit of theology.

“God only knows
God makes his plan
The information’s unavailable
To the mortal man.”

Ok, I didn’t say it was good theology. The image here is a God who is arbitrary and manipulative. It’s true that God was sometimes portrayed that way in the Hebrew Bible, but revelation, too, is evolutionary, and subsequent revelation revealed a much different God, one who is above all loving and compassionate.

As hard as we might try to project human values onto God, the ultimate message of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles is a jolting one: the idea that God made us in his image and likeness is qualified by our freedom to mess up.

In the first book of Samuel in the Hebrew Bible, God chooses David as king of Israel against all odds, rejecting the human choice.

“But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on the appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord sees not as a man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

Union Members Appalled?
One of the hardest stories in the Christian Bible for modern people to appreciate is Jesus’ story about the workmen in the vineyard who are paid the same regardless of the hour that they start work. I’m sure union members are appalled each time they hear it or read it.

The vineyard owner agrees with a group of workers on a day’s wages and pays what he promises. But he hires other workers who start much later – even an hour before quitting time - and pays them the same. Not surprisingly, the first to be hired complain and in Jesus’ story, the employer responds.

“…Do you begrudge my generosity?” Then Jesus delivers the punch line: “So the last will be first, and the first last,” generally interpreted to mean that those who are most important, most powerful, most fortunate and wealthiest in this world will not be so in the next. 

The fear of falling behind is “normal,” I suppose, for humans who measure their value by comparison to others. But that can’t be the measure for people of faith or people searching for God. For us, “success” is incomparable because it depends on God’s judgment, not that of other human beings.