edgy hell holes

     Have you ever met anyone just dying to be deep?

              I have—me.

Pleased to meet you.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a deep thinker. This is admirable. But if you want it just to be seen as eclectic and cool, than ‘it‘ loses something.

Here’s what I mean:

I remember when I was a kid, I desperately wanted to stand out. I loved being flanked by adults saying, “You’re so grown up for your age!” and ”Yup, this one’s going to do something. That’s for sure.”

I started craving this sort of attention, and would think up new ways to get it. I decided writing assignments worked well, so I would think up really edgy one liners that no third grader had any business writing. I had this one in particular:

     “We’re the ones that created this hell hole, and now we have to live in it.”

Deep.

I just knew that no other kid was brave enough to write the word “hell” in any written assignment that was going to be turned in and read by the teacher. “Hell hole. Yeah that’s good.”

Except there was one problem. I didn’t have any idea what this meant. So I would just use it whenever I wanted to. It didn’t matter if we were writing about the fifty states or an essay about what our dad’s do at work…I would always find an excuse to throw that one line in there.

I could picture all of the teachers sitting in the lounge, the air heavy with smoke. “Hey everybody…listen to this” says one, moving his bite of salami from the middle of his mouth to the cheek. ‘My father leaves his heart on his desk everyday, but it’s still not good enough. We’re the ones that created this hell-hole, and now we have to live in it.’ Poetry. I mean really! Who writes like this?” A previously bored english teacher looks up from her folded issue of TIME. “What was that? One of YOUR kids wrote that? What’s his name?”taking off her glases in disbelief. “Well his name is Caleb. He seems average enough…”

I could just see it in front page news:

“SELF AWARE THIRD  GRADER WRITES AWARD WINNING ESSAY.”

But you know what? The teachers never noticed. I would show the kids, and they would all gasp and say “You’re turning that in?” I’d just nod. “This is a story that has to be told.”

A lot of those kids really thought I was deep. They were wrong.

But sometimes I feel like a lot of us do that now, including me. Everyone is trying to outshock everyone else. Everybody has to know how deep we are. And we also have to get indiginant over stupid things:

“As Christians, one of our primary responsibilities is to care for the planet God has given us. An unbelieving world is watching!”

Uh…sorry. next time I’ll recycle my newspaper.

Because being ‘green’ right now is cool. And it’s a sure bet if you can score points on people with your deep thoughts about the environment.

“We’ve got to be careful! We’re the one that created this hell-hole, and now we have to live in it!”

There…see how easy that was?

But there’s an issue that’s not cool to talk about.

     abortion.

You can literally see people roll their eyes when somebody talks about the perils of abortion. Because that was cool to get mad about 10 years ago. When this happens, I just have to remind myself that 50 million of their angels in heaven saw the whole thing…and they’re telling Dad.

Wouldn’t it be better if the Spirit of God quickened us to confront the issues that are most burdensome to Him? That way the right people get offended, and the right people get involved.

I’m not saying that caring for the environment is wrong…not in the least. But did it matter to you before Bono got upset about it?  Did you pray about this?

Just a word of caution: Let’s not be ‘deep’ for image’s sake. Admittedly, in the time that we live, this is difficult. But if we’re more concerned with being godly, being deep will take care of itself.

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I’d love to hear your comments and know what you think. I want to be open to correction as much as anything else.

In the service of Jesus,

watchdog