"I don't wanna grow up, I'm a Toys R Us kid..."

When I was a kid one of the best movies my friends and I watched was a movie with Tom Hanks entitled, Big. This movie was about a boy who made a wish and the next day he woke up looking like an adult. He was "Big". Reflecting on the movie as this point in my life, "Big" is a story about adolescents desire to be adults.

This narrative seems to have been a common theme throughout time - kids desiring to be adults.

That is until now.

My wife and I rented "17 Again". This is a movie about an adult who desires to be, well, 17 again.

This really got me thinking about the current cultural trend to extend adolescence. Graduates go to college with their high school clicks. Botox is still uber popular. Everyone desires to be younger than they are. Many movies, especially comedies, are sophomoric and geared for the teenage male.

Could this be the first time in history that we adults would rather be kids than adults?

If our culture idolizes our adolescent who are the adults going to be?

Thank you Nike and Wal-Mart, but we are more than that.

Our culture continues to impress upon me that what it means to be a human being is to be a consumer and a competitor. And while I am those things at times, I am more than that.

I am not always looking for the lowest prices. I am looking for meaning, I am looking for a cause.

Just doing it makes me into a mindless zombie. I desire to live my life with intention and purpose.

So thank you Nike and Wal-Mart, but we are more than consumers and competitors.

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Carpentry makes for lousy parables

Talking with the ministers the other day about theology and whatnot and in the course of the conversation we began to talk about the Church's mission to help people gain meaning for their lives. In that pursuit, the Church must be able to help people discover language which helps articulate a meaning for them to embody. We commented how we each felt about how the Church is doing (not too well at the moment) and then discussed the influence of scientific atheism in the culture.

In the course of the conversation something struck me about Jesus and his ability to speak to the people he was with. He never once used a parable dealing with carpentry.

Parables of coins, strangers, sheep, sons, grain, goats... sure. Parables of hammers, tables, crafting, designing... no.

The only one I could connect to carpentry was the saying where we should not talk about the splinter in our neighbors eye with a plank of wood in our own. But that is a weak connection at best.

By all accounts Jesus was a carpenter. In fact the "Passion of the Christ" has Jesus making the first table people sit down in chairs at to eat a meal. But he hung out with fishermen, farmers, and the socially estranged of society. Thus his parables and language reflect this.

Perhaps the Church could take a lesson from this and stop trying to control a conversation and force it to always be about God. Not everyone is comfortable or even knows theology or God-talk. But everyone has an area or a world which they know and can relate with and the Church could possibly connect with more people if we were only willing to stop talking about God with our own insider language and talk about God with the language of the people we are in relationship with.

Either that or Carpentry makes for lousy parables.

Culture Making, meet Gandhi...

Whenever I despair, I remember that the way of truth and love has always won. There may be tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they may seem invincible, but in the end, they always fail. Think of it: always
-Gandhi

In light of this quote I ran across a section in the book "Culture Making" which I though was stated very nicely.

Nothing that matters, no matter how sudden, does not have a long history and take part in a long future. And like earthquakes, revolutions are much better at destroying than building. There is an important asymmetry here, whose roots go all the way down to the laws of physics: It is possible to change things quickly for the worse. It only took two hours after the collision between a 767 and the South Tower of the World Trade Center to destroy it. But no one can build the World Trade Center in two hours. The only thing you can do with Rome in a day is burn it.
The Revolutionaries - and terrorists - of the world put their hope in cataclysmic events. But even they are likely to be disappointed by the long-term effects of their actions.
-Andy Crouch (Culture Making)

I am not sure what to make of all this but I really like these two quotes.