Again and again in history, when events get unusually complex or threatening, the tendency is to turn to our sense of total powerlessness. People can feel that things are in such a mess that only the intervention of God himself is capable of undoing what has been done. The role of passive dependency is always easier than a stance of responsible involvement. Who has not, like a little child, wanted to gather up all the broken things and take them to Daddy to fix? The impulse to let someone else come in and solve all our difficulties is very strong; in fact, it is the classic infantile reaction to any problem, and who can deny that speculating abstractly about a problem or about the future is less demanding than working at solving the problem, or serving lovingly and sacrificially in the present?