I love all-night road trips and the Diet Dew-filled craziness they entail! I forget what brought Saved By The Bell to mind on my last journey, but once it popped in it stuck, thumping and churning like an old washer/dryer.
Something that struck me anew after all this time was Zach Morris’s amazing super power—the ability to stop time with his infamous “Time-Out.”
It was the Deus Ex Machina of afternoon TV. Whenever Zach got into a pickle he couldn’t grin his way out of, he’d turn to the camera like he was coach of the universe itself and yell “Time-out.” The world would grind to a halt and he’d be able to think things over, rearrange what he needed to, and right his world—literally without missing a beat. Why he didn’t use it more often, we’ll never know.
What’s more, he used his incredible power for mostly benign, uninspiring feats—dodging a punch, skipping detention. For a demi-god, he really shot low. Sounds like a high-school dude to me. For years I’ve obsessed over the idea of absolute truth—proving its existence, using that proof as a hammer to pound home the reality of God—before coming to the conclusion that it’s impossible for me to prove that absolute truth exists, because I’m not absolute myself. I’ve been around for roughly .000001% of history. My knowledge and experience is the proverbial raindrop in the ocean. I’m also a prisoner of circumstance and time, powerless to press pause or change the view. What can I ABSOLUTELY state about the universe?
While I lamented my inability to declare any truth to be absolute, SBTB reminded me that it doesn’t matter, because I’m not Zach Morris. Zach had the ability to slip out of the rushing stream of time and take a view from the bank. The rest of us shmucks have to ride the paddle-less, rudderless tube-ride of life without a time-out.
Whether or not truth is absolute, we have to deal with it. Gravity may not be absolute truth, but it still affects you. The same’s true for bus schedules, unit conversion, flu vaccines. Even lowly old relative truth can still ruin your day.
So, what do we do? Actually, you’ve been doing it since you were old enough to make choices: you play the odds. We do this without thinking most of the time—we treat life as a gambler’s game, and honestly we’ve gotten pretty good at it. How many times have you looked at a wall and thought, “I might be able to walk through that thing today!” It’s kind of a “duh” principle, but you catch my drift.
The choices we make are wagers. We’re betting things will turn out the way we want, based on what we’ve learned about life so far.
The one area of our lives that seems to rate exception is the spiritual. We pretend that the same gambling principles of risk and reward don’t apply in that realm. Instead, we can use the idea of relativity like a talisman, warding off the curse of having to choose a path. The problem remains, though, that truth you don’t acknowledge still hurts (or helps) you. The idea of spiritual truth being relative doesn’t excuse us from the consequences of our choice (or lack thereof).
Don’t get lulled into believing that you needn’t make a wise decision about spirituality. It’s time to play the odds. Unless you’re Zack Morris. In that case, better have that Time-Out handy.
