I've been reading newspapers all my life, and during this entire time the pages of the newspaper have been about the same size. A curious thing has been happening to newspapers lately, however. They have been getting narrower and narrower. I suppose it's not too curious because newspapers are under a lot of pressure these days. With the advent of the Internet, more people are getting their news on-line rather than from traditional newspapers. So, many newspapers have seen their circulation declining. Also, because of the popularity of many Internet sites for listing things the newspapers have been losing ad revenue. With spiraling costs and declining revenue, they have resorted to saving money by reducing the size of the pages on which they print the news. Shaving a few inches here and there greatly reduces their costs for newsprint, ink, etc.
This reduction in the size of a typical newspaper, however, requires some adjustment on the part of long-time newspaper readers like me. I often feel that I am reading a pamphlet instead of a newspaper.
My main concern in these days, however, is not over the narrow newspapers we read. My main concern is over the narrow viewpoints that seem to predominate in our day. Narrowing viewpoints and the hardening of those viewpoints make for difficult days.
A man once asked a pastor how many people his church building would seat. He said, "About 200." Later, after his church had given the cold shoulder to some visitors who came from a lower socio-economic group, the pastor saw the man who had asked him about the seating capacity of his church. The pastor said, "I told you a couple of weeks ago that our church would seat about 200 people. I was wrong. It will seat about 300. My people are a good bit narrower than I thought."
Reminds me of a man in a small community who was notoriously narrow-minded. An acquaintance of the man said, "He is so narrow-mined that both of his eyes look out of the same hole." Now that is narrow!
It's been said that all of us are ignorant; we are just ignorant on different subjects. The same could be said about our narrow-mindedness. All of us are narrow-minded. We are just narrow-minded on different subjects.
In spite of this being one of our besetting sins, we seldom deal with it directly. One pastor said that he could never recall a single member asking for persons to pray that he would be healed of his narrow-mindedness.
On the other hand, we need to guard against being so broadminded that anything goes. Vance Havner said that it is possible to be so broadminded that you are "flat-headed." What we need is the kind of balance that marked the life of Jesus--narrow enough to insist that there is one way to the Father and broad enough to reach out to a world with the love of God!
