What a Wonderful Caricature of Intimacy!
Consider the resources that are spent into expressing love. Money splurged on roses, chocolate, nice dinners, and making sure we smell nice. Movies make millions if they properly formulate the romanticized concept of what love should look like. Millions made from girls who make their men pay more money to watch them. Pity the male gender.
We know we can never meet the expectations of that beautiful man on the silver screen. God knows we’ll try. We’ll keep buying more roses and chocolate. If the mood strikes, we may even write crappy poems/songs/haikus for them. We’ll keep trying because despite the physical and mental impossibilities, we want to be those wonderful men that girls love in the movies. Unfortunately, we don’t have the budget for all the nice clothes and fancy scriptwriters. Ladies, please remember men are trying to be movie stars with a minimum wage fiscal plan. We do it for you. Because if we didn’t, you would have nothing to do with us.
The stupid thing about those movies is that they cram an entire relationship into 2.5 hours. Two cases in point: A Walk To Remember (stupid stupid stupid). The Notebook (which was actually well-done).
On planet earth, men are lucky if we go that long without saying something stupid.
The thing is, we all want love. All those stupid movies are by-products of that longing. It’s encoded into our genetics. We were never meant to live a solitary existence. Mankind sucks at being alone, and loneliness is probably the slowest way to kill someone. Love is only cure for this condition. It has the power to make us want to be more than we ever thought we could be. It breaches the wall that we put up to keep ourselves from getting hurt. It is powerful voodoo. Love is proof that there is more to life than chemicals and biology because it requires us to put someone else’s needs before our own. It makes us defy our own nature and for one split second we are immortal again, basking in the glory of Eden. Love is the road sign that points to eternity. And God has put Himself in the centre of it all.
If we love someone, we get to know them. We want to hear even the most asinine stories about them because love magically makes everything fascinating. When I was going out with Autumn, I went to her curling tournament. I fricken’ hate curling. But I was in love, and in love, I spent 5 hours watching (mostly old people) huck rocks across ice. When I really got bored, I played solitaire by myself. I learned that day love is doing things you don’t want to do simply because it’s important to someone special. And if we see people in God’s eyes, everyone is special.
So if we love God, we should spend time getting to know Him. I really think God likes it we spend time talking to Him. I could go on forever about God being the source of all love, and how knowing Him makes us more like Him, but I don’t think I need to. You either believe it or you don’t. If you believe it, than you should live it.
I think the point of all this is that love makes us do odd things, like “contrary-to-our-own-nature” sort of things. Secondly, love makes life really worth living. And God makes love worth the risk.
For you girls out there, for the sake of all men, please stop expecting your relationships to be like the movies and books…especially the Christian books. The men in them are waaaaay to Christ-like. We just can’t live up to those expectations…the pressure, it’s just too much. There are just not any men who are actually like those guys. There. I said it.
(Before I get too much flack, I believe romance is good. Doing nice things because we love someone is good. I myself am I hopeless romantic. I even enjoyed Francine River’s Redeeming Love because it portrayed Christ’s love very well and it is a beautiful story (although in real life, Hosea would have back-handed that chick by the fourth chapter). But expecting relationships to be “just so” or “happen a certain way” is not cool. It causes too much pressure and does not allow for thing to be natural. Okay. Now I feel vindicated.)
The government IS out to get you.
Church sucks sometimes.
I don’t blame God. I think I more or less blame the institutionalized church. The one that says a vote for ___ is a vote for Jesus or some silly thing like that, or push political agendas. Historically, politics and Christianity don’t mix well. Personally I believe politics are from the devil, and Christians shouldn’t hang out with the devil. I mean, we probably should vote for someone, and have an opinion on the matter, but government bodies tend have too much power and influence and that sort of thing corrupts people. It’s odd to me the church spends a lot of time telling the youth to avoid worldly things, which is interpreted much of the time as meaning piercing, tattoos and abrasive music. Yet we are encouraged to support a system that has been proven in the past to breed corruption. Government bodies are really good examples of people doing really bad things just to have power. To me, that seems kinda “worldly”. As for piercing, tattoos, and abrasive music, they remain “cool”.
Christians should only be allowed to go into politics if they are called to be missionaries.
Did I mention I don’t like politics?
Another reason I’ve been disillusioned with the North American church is that more and more I feel like it’s become a routine of sorts. I mean, we show up, shake hands, sing some songs, hear someone talk for 20 minutes, than leave for dinner. And everyone feels good about themselves. I dunno. It seems kind of unbiblical.
When I read about the church in the Bible, people are hanging out with the poor and challenging the status quo instead of creating it. That’s why it was persecuted. It stood up for something. Not to say the churches didn’t have some problems…or a lot of problems (those nutty Corinthians)…but people were proactive. It refused to be routine with the trappings of religion.
I know some of you are thinking that I’m being harsh and not all churches are like that. You’re probably right. I guess I just want to see churches as a whole proving God is relevant by maybe giving up some of our personal agenda and perhaps doing what is really counter-cultural: Demonstrating through our actions that we give a damn about people. And show that God really wants everyone to know Him. This includes students, addicts, orphans, merchants, and even those dirty politicians.
Warning! Contains excess of personal opinion!
I was reading a random blog a while ago, and this guy (I don’t know him personally) said that he loved it when God broke him. Before I go on, let me say that I have nothing against this person (more or less because I have no idea who he is), and he seems like a cool dude. But his perspective kind of made me mad. It was like he was bragging about his spirituality and how he embraced brokenness like it was some state of nirvana. Maybe I’m judging him harshly. Perhaps it was because it was late and I was merely tired. Whatever it was, his comments bothered me.
The more I thought about it, I came to conclude that we should never “love it” when we are broken. We should never embark some “journey of brokenness”. When it happens it will happen. Saying that it is something to look forward to, and something to love, is simply ridiculous.
I say this because being broken sucks. It hurts. And although we need to allow God to do whatever He wants in our lives (or let Him allow painful things into it), brokenness is not a bragging right. Christians don't have some special claim on painful life change. Protestants, Catholics, atheists, Muslims, Jews, and whoever all go through their own personal crisis. Thoughts, ideals, priorities are realigned, altered, and given up for the hope of something better. Sometimes a terrible thing will happen because it is life crashing into us and it tears us apart. We don’t love it. Some will hate God because of it. I believe the power of pain tends to be greatly underestimated.
But I do believe that being broken is a good thing if we allow it to be. It reminds me this movie I watched a long time ago. The movie was terrible, but there is one scene I have always played back in my head over the years: a guy is drowning in a river, and he’s taking his friend down with him because he was in hysterics. So his friend has to punch him in the face to calm him down. He was a good friend.
Sometimes I think that’s what God does to us. The world has walked hand in hand into white-water and it is drowning itself. When we’re scared, we’ll crawl all over each other just for one more breath and one more chance to break the surface. So I think God is perfectly justified if He hits us and yells, “Calm down! Look at me! Pay attention to my voice!”
He’s justified because we’ve overlooked that He’s not merely the life raft. He is also the shore, the sunlight, and the distant horizon. We don’t notice because our attention is on deadly currents and choking lungs. We forget He wants to save us from the water by any means necessary.
So we shouldn’t say we love it when we are broken. For one thing, it makes us liars. Another is that it takes to focus off what we are becoming, providing we let God walk us through it.
(As a disclaimer, trusting God doesn’t mean we get off the hook when it comes to crappy things happening to us. It just means there is someone who is bigger than our circumstances taking care of us, whether or not we feel it.)
