Electric doughnutmakers, crockpots, bread machines, and food dehydrators are innovations. They don't necessarily represent progress. We prize success. Our particular heroes are those who started out with nothing and pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and died while at the top. We're big on bootstrap tuggers.
Life is built on hard work.
We reward the workaholics in public with praise and promotion and salary hikes, even while they are rewarded at home with divorce, alienation and broken health. It strikes me that ours is not really much of a bootstrap faith. We are not called to be successful, but to be faithful. We worship a God who created us to be in relationship with our creator and with each other. We worship a God who teaches that those relationships are the purpose and fulfillment of life, and who, toward that end, speaks and acts, and longs to be heard.