"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?
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.
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.
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.
Be the change by Jason Valendy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.