Drinking and driving.

Drinking and driving. It’s illegal. Evidently it’s been illegal for a long time. I remember reading something about it in a driver’s training book when I was much younger. I also remember being perplexed that my dad could drive up to McDonald’s, order a Big Mac with a soda and drive away. Wasn’t that also illegal? How could McDonald’s get away with selling drinks to drivers when the state of Texas said it was against the law? It took me a while to understand that ‘drinking’ referred to alcohol. The only drinking I knew was soda. My frame of reference didn’t include alcohol.

It’s good to understand that sometimes our frame of reference isn’t broad enough or deep enough to include everything. In my journey of faith, there are things I don’t understand… yet. That’s okay. I love the changes God has made in me as I experience hardship, grace, maturity and peace. My frame of reference is changing and with it, the depth of my understanding of who Jesus is and who I am in Him.

It’s funny how the mind works. All I wanted to do was drive home while drinking my Dr. Pepper. Instead, God reminds me of a funny episode in the life of Brian, then makes it matter for today.

Shallow Christianity

I was reading somewhere online about why Christians are shallow. I read the usual “not enough quiet time” “we need to spend more time in the Word” “we are too distracted by ’stuff’”. I don’t think those responses were necessarily bad or wrong, they just don’t go deep enough.

Do we need to overcome our inadequacies, our failures, our lack of will-power? Or is it something else? I think it’s something else. Why would we think that we could develop a deep relationship with Christ when we find precious little in our culture that teaches how to take time to pursue a relationship for more than personal gain. Think about our culture today. Everything is super-quick: McDonald’s, e-mail, IM, texting. What in our culture teaches us how to have an actual relationship? What have we seen that inspires us to pursue the difficult?

Relationships are hard. They take work. They take sacrifice. They take longer than 27 seconds to mature. I am not bashing our culture. Nor am I advocating that followers of Christ wage a war on American culture. I am merely pointing out the obvious. I don’t think people are shallow Christians because of what they do or don’t do. I think people are shallow Christians because throughout their lives they haven’t been exposed to the rewards of long-term relationship. Not just a spiritual relationship, but relationships with people.

Before we look to blame, we should look to teach. Before we cast off the bad, we should inspire them to greatness.

The Joy of Community

We are built for community. It is simply the way we are wired, but we have recreated our identities to be self-sufficient and independent. Need, especially of another, is not a concept we value very highly in our culture. Stuff, motion, and noise have taken the place of friendship, pause and solitude. We struggle for identity in a self-made world that denies how we function best… in community. Our ability to interact with others in meaningful, unselfish ways changes the face of friendship and challenges us to grow. Who I am as a person enhances who we are as friends. We have forgotten the joy of community and our part in it. We have settled for “the same as everyone else” while denying that we are settling for who we are not. In a way we have forgotten what makes us unique.