I love productivity hacks. I love the idea that there's a secret button I can push that makes hard things easy. But I've noticed something about myself: I can spend an hour searching for the perfect shortcut to avoid thirty minutes of work.

But what I'm really doing isn't managing time. I'm managing discomfort, trying to avoid the friction of starting something that'll take some effort.

Often, the shortcut doesn't just not help; it actually harms. It trains me to distrust the ordinary way of doing work. It turns my attention into a scavenger hunt. It makes me less patient, less steady, and less willing to do the slow work that actually accomplishes something positive.

And what's true in my little life is also true in our shared life. Communities reach for hacks, too. Institutions do it. But the danger isn't that we want good outcomes. That's what we're shooting for, isn't it? We want results.

No, the danger is that we'll choose a path that achieves the result we're after while quietly betraying the very purpose for doing it in the first place.

Not every purpose, of course. Shortcuts are sometimes super helpful. Finding an easier way to clean the gutters, remembering to buy stamps, or mopping the floor. All helpful.

But finding a shortcut to learning the flute, being a good person, or building a good marriage can undercut the very goals you're trying to achieve.

If the task produces an outcome, hacks are usually fine.

But if the task is meant to form a person, a community, or a relationship, hacks are dangerous. They can actively thwart the thing you set out to accomplish. They're cheat codes that, by using them lose the game.

Communities reach for hacks, too. When fear rises, and pressure builds to "do something," institutions go looking for a button that produces visible results fast. And right now, one of the buttons being mashed in city after city is immigration enforcement. ICE operations intended to project order and control.

The promise is simple: Deport the “problem," and the community gets safer.

But the gospel doesn’t let me stop at “the promise” of good things in the future. It makes me ask what else we sacrifice to get quick results that fast. What happens to a city when fear becomes policy? What happens to trust when ordinary life gets to be a risk calculation?

In Minneapolis and St. Paul, a major ICE surge just ended on February 12th. Public health researchers are calling these sweeps a public health emergency because the unintended consequences don't stay contained. People avoid doctors. Parents get afraid to send kids to school. Families pull back from services they're legally entitled to. Kids live with chronic fear. And even after the vans leave, the community takes years to recover.

I mean, do Renee Good's wife and children just move on with their lives?

Do Alex Pretti's parents turn to the next thing?

Will little Liam Conejo Ramos wake up with nightmares for the rest of his life?

If the purpose is public safety, the question is whether a strategy that spreads fear makes us safer … or just more controlled. If the purpose is a stable community, the question is whether we can keep calling it "order" when it fractures the very relationships that make a city function.

A shortcut that promises order but mass produces fear isn't solving the problem. It's relocating the pain onto the backs of the people with the least power to absorb it.

Which brings me to the wilderness.

Every year on the first Sunday of Lent, we read this story. Jesus, water still dripping off him from his baptism, confirmed as God's beloved, gets led by the Spirit into the desert, where he fasts for forty days and faces the devil. Pretty well-worn story at this point.