Unless it is Bent

I cannot think very clearly these days. I have no lack of thoughts bouncing through my mind, but there is little control or grasp of those thoughts. I cannot hold tightly to one long enough to develop a full idea and therefore I have no strong ideas that lead to me to action. Seasons such as this, are not uncommon to me. It’s paralyzing to a large degree and it’s altogether frustrating.

Sunday, my thoughts began to move in a more consistent direction as my pastor preached a sermon on 2 Peter and passivity. He began by playing a portion of Martin Luther King’s, “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” speech. In the address, King comments on the condition of men’s backs:

"If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent. "

King was obviously making an allusion to the oppression of the black men and women during that period. And our country has grown much, relating to this oppression, since these words were spoken, but true and good words transcend time and specific instances in history and I believe his words here reach into our culture today.

But our backs are not bent from being ridden by oppressive men. Quite opposite of racial oppression, our backs are bent from the soft couches in our living rooms. Our backs our bent from reaching to push the button to surf the channels, or to record our weekly addiction. Our backs are bent from the pull of the ear buds that fill our heads with noise. Our backs are bent from the atrophy of our leisure… from our master, complacency.

It is not that our culture has too much leisure, but that we hardly realize that we have it because it’s filled with out second thought as to how it should be used. I often have read that people today have more leisure time than any other time in human history. I’m not sure if this is true, but it seems likely.

As believers our leisure is not used as it was intended, to enjoy communion with brothers and sisters, to serve those in need or simply to do something outside of our own consumption. We fill our spare time with things that numb our minds and keep us from thought or action.

We seek out gray for our leisure. Justification for our complacency cannot be found in the black and white of the Gospel, but if we could just pry open a gray area in the midst of it then we could at least escape our thoughts of guilt. We have done this successfully and we then fill that time with noise and amusement so that our mind will not easily wander back to the black and white. And we can keep afloat in the sea of gray.

I hope and I pray that I am beginning to grow weary of the gray; because I confess that I’m drowning in it. The only way out is, by grace, to straighten my back and shed the oppression of my complacency. Complacency cannot ride my back unless it is bent.

Depravity and the Mavs

I have finally seen it. I have seen the lowest, most humiliating and shallow point that our society can reach. Well, I’m sure that we can and have gone much lower, but this is the lowest I have witnessed first-hand in recent memory. As I diverted myself last week for a few hours to watch a greatly competitive basketball game between the Mavericks and the Phoenix Suns, I witnessed new depths to our depravity as a society.

As has become popular at most sporting events these days, there were confused and scantily-clad young women doing something that I cannot call dancing in between whistles. I would categorize these young women as prostitutes, as they are being paid for nothing more than to stimulate the lust in the hearts of men. I understand this may come across as harsh, and assuredly they do not view themselves in this manner, but I cannot see this any other way. However, I might think more highly of prostitution on a street corner as opposed to this type of prostitution because this is done solely for the reason keeping our attention during a 60-second timeout, but I digress…

Now, I try my best to keep my eyes fixed on the floor or in the opposite direction when these young women prance to the court, but depravity has a diabolical way of bringing other depravity to the surface. As I glanced up from the roster in my hand about midway through the fourth quarter, my eyes witnessed one of the most pathetic sights that I can ever recall. The Mavericks have what are called MAAniacs. These are the exact physical opposites of the young dancing women, all done for the sake of humor. They are a group of mostly middle-aged, very overweight men with not a lot to do otherwise. Evidently nothing could be more humorous in Dallas than these men. Then add in a midget and we have non-stop laughs and entertainment for the entire evening. The best way I can describe this group to you is to picture in your head the combined epitome of sloth and gluttony and pull that across 40 years.

So now on the court, I stared as if watching a train wreck, and I see the dozen falsely attractive prostitutes doing a semi-clothed strip tease and they are surrounded by the dozen aging obese couch potatoes and a midget who are doing their best to imitate that strip tease, and all of this done to worthless music and to 14,000 cheering and laughing fans whose cheers and laughs get heartier when the fat men shake their rear in the air.

One of the saddest parts of this observation is that, if I’m on honest, on another night, perhaps I’m one of the laughing fans and in my mind I’m eerily aware of that fact. But last night I couldn’t laugh, I was saddened and angry. I was saddened by observing what these people were ignorantly flaunting, I was more saddened by observing how the crowd was so pleased to have them make subhuman spectacles of themselves, and I was angered by the fact that the producers of this debauchery is what they thought we paid to see, and I was more angered by the fact that they were right.

Please keep in mind; this is that Dallas in the home of the mega-church, and its smack in the middle of the Bible belt. This is not New York or Hollywood. How can we have so much knowledge and awareness of Christ surrounding us and yet still praise such debauchery? What is it in us that makes become like dogs that will bark at anything? How can we be blind to the way we seek to consume in anyway we can? How can we forget that we are humans and not dogs? The answer is not as much that that we are blind to our consumption as we are content with it. We know that we are humans but choose willingly to equate ourselves with the dogs.

Outside of perhaps Steve Nash in between dance routines, there is not one creative act going on. The music is that of consumption and not creativity, the clothing (or lack thereof) on the young women is that of consumption and not of beauty, the dancing is not of artistic expression but of consumption, all of this is consuming the women in the stands as they take note of what they need to strive for to gain the attention of a man, the obese men with bellies hanging out and over have seemingly known nothing outside of consumption their whole lives and this is obvious to any observer, the men in the stands consume further as they laugh not because of true comedy (which can be creative) but mostly because they have found someone they are in their minds clearly superior to and that is hilarious, and I need not comment on the midget. This is something truly pathetic and sad. It is worth grieving over.

Everywhere we look in our society we see it screaming at us as that we are consumers. They tell us that that is how we are designed and that it is what we are meant to do. Advertising is based completely on consumption. The marketers have preyed on innate animalistic selfish desires. I think most of us recognize this and can give lip service to it. However, it seems we either do not necessarily disagree that we are meant to be consumers or we do not fully understand the how deeply this consumption disease has contaminated our blood.

We have moved past complacency and into acceptance of our lust to consume. It’s this disease of consumption that’s steadily turning us into animals with nothing other than instincts to lead us. The only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to reason, which allows for our capacity for communion with a higher being. This ability to reason is what enables us to make decisions for our overall good as opposed to what can satisfy us, to our detriment, in the immediate moment. It’s how we know to take an longer alternate route, in order to make it to our destination on time, when our physically fastest passage is jammed with traffic. It’s what allows us to decide whether to eat the second piece of cake or eat the carrot because it will improve our overall healthy thereby producing greater benefit in the future. Either we choose to be humans or revert to animals.

These luring mirages of fleeting satisfaction cause us to forsake our overall health (physically, mentally and spiritually) for what we want or think we need for an immediate happiness boost or to anesthetize ourselves to a greater problem. There is a hole of fulfillment that we try to fill or cover up. Society promises us that they have the answer to fill the hole. We instinctively follow like sheep being led to the slaughter. We indulge every urge with what appears may satisfy our soul and give us pleasure. One might begin to think with trial and error we would try a new process to fill that hole, but instead we keep trying to quench our thirst with a different flavor of salt water. The more we try to pack in the void, the larger the void becomes.

Consumption has consumed our society. As a human being you only have two options of your behavior, whether conscious or not. As human you either consuming or you are creating. In every second of every moment you are doing one of the two (sometimes both). You either consume lusts of the world with food or sexual urges or drugs, etc., or you consume people with your conversations about yourself or about nothing more important than sports or television and or you consume your time with laziness.

Everyday is a natural flow of consumption if we don’t find away to get out of it. Our other behavioral option is to create. Mostly we associate creativity with some sort of art, but it runs so much deeper than that. We also think that creativeness is a quality that you’re either born with or your not, but it’s more complex than that… or perhaps is simpler in its own paradox. We have wrongly defined creativity as some intangible artistic flare, but it is simply the capacity to create. To understand what it means to create we must go back to the original act of creation, to the genesis. God didn’t randomly create, trying to perfect his artistic flare. The art of nature and humanity came from His creation. Taking that a step further, He didn’t just make something blindly and move on, He asked the questions "Is it good?" He knew that a true creation must contribute something, if it doesn’t then it is a consumptive act and not a creative act.

Now that we have defined creativity outside of the realm of typically defined ‘art’, we must seek to define how one creates. We create when we contribute something to someone or something. If your music or painting creates in others a sense of value in a person then it is creative. If it guides or encourages or enlightens or inspires it can be considered creative. Creativity is when you seek to know someone and to understand their thoughts and feelings, when you serve someone without selfish intent, when you care in a tangible for another human being and when there is purpose in the way you respond to something. One way this is accomplished is music, painting and other arts, but this is also done in a conversation or in a simple act or simply choosing not to fear to encourage someone else. There are no special skills required to accomplish this. Present mindedness and an outward non-selfish focus are the only things required. Creativity will flow from that. What we boil this down to is that as we walk around in life, we are either consuming or creating.

Most of us, most of the time are merely consuming people, time and oxygen. However when you learn to step outside of your selfishness and vanity you can begin to understand creativity and being to create more than you consume. If everyone is consuming there will be nothing left to take in but trash, but if everyone is seeking to create there will be an overflow of goodness. Those of us who aspire to a higher calling from God can give assent to this, but therein lies the problem. We are the problem when we acknowledge this with our lips but still consume with our lifestyle. We justify it because now we altered our appetite to consume different things than we did before and people tell us these things are good and that we are okay. But God never meant his gifts for consumption, he meant them as tools of creation.

If we don’t seek to use God’s gifts for creation then our broken cisterns will run dry with everyone else’s’. We are the problem. We should be the one’s who point the way for others, but instead we wallow in the mire with them.