Life is a funny thing today. I guess it always has been, there have always been problems that people have been trying to fight and ideas have always been evolving. The pursuit of knowledge plagues us, our hunger to know who we are, where we came from and where we’re going starves us of living happily with today. The fact is that now FOMO rules us, there is a new fad, a new craze every day. If you put down your phone for one weekend you miss out on staying relevant because the world has already changed and moved on. Fame is no longer real. Everyone has a moment in the spotlight, but it is fleeting. We concern ourselves more with the latest celebrity ship than we do with those real and tangible ones. I’m growing up in a generation that finds it hard to produce some original, something physical as all we’ve known is a digital age. As consumers the internet is our life blood, we have grown up thinking that a binge is good and normal, because when it’s been a bad day there’s Netflix to comfort us. We’ve been taught that casual sex is good and healthy and that porn is a normal part of sex. This is not ok. We are tearing up relationships because we feel pressure to conform, we’re not being taught the real values in which to live by, that you can disagree with someone without calling them an ignorant twat, we can love someone and let them in on our lives without giving them all we have, we can get over a broken relationship without getting under someone else’s body. Our culture has been polluted by being politically correct and promote letting everyone live their lives without fear of consequence. The rise of STI’s (both transmission and the resilience) sexual abuse, domestic abuse, mental health issues, homelessness, substance abuse, broken-heartedness, PTSD and countless other plagues show that something is wrong.
I believe we’ve gone too far to bring it back on human strength alone, it’s too easy for corrupt people to gain power as all we care about in money, and the truth is even if the right person was elected they wouldn’t get it right as no one knows the answers of how to run a perfect society. The only way for it to change is a powerful move of God. Maybe even the second coming. There is nothing else that can possibly change the mindset of a diseased culture. We need the words ‘safe’, ‘beautiful’, ‘precious’ and ‘treasured’ to have meaning behind them again. We value what strangers think of us far and beyond what people who are close to us think. We need to be less self-obsessed. We need to fight fear.
Fear is one of the biggest challenges right now as it sets us against ourselves and others. We fear what we might say in order to kill our status. We fear others in what they may do to us. We fear vulnerability as we fear admitting to ourselves and to someone else that we are not who we put up for the world to see. We fear failure. Fear grips every single person and it is only a curse that the cross can break. The cross has broken it but we don’t let go of it. It makes us like anyone else. We fear fearlessness as once we are fearless that scared little voice in our heads can’t control us and we might do or say what we want to. That voice is there so we aren’t excluded from society. But do we really want to be part of a society that crushes differences that are within set parameters? You can be an atheist and share your views publically that God could never exist because of science etc but to be a Christian and share your views that God is the only possible explanation and that you love him with all you are? Unforgivable. There’s different and then there’s, well, different.
I wish that I could override fear. I wish I could override the need to fit. I wish I felt strong enough to fulfill my calling. I wish I didn’t fear my calling was a lie. But wishing doesn’t work.
Prayer does. Prayer and a relationship with the one true and faithful God loosen the need to be human. Loosens the desire for fear as it’s normal. God loosens despair and brokenness. God brings safety. God brings true and real and whole love. God shows us who we can be. God carries our burdens with us, not for us. God brings light in a dark world. God is constant, as time is human and not divine. God is infuriatingly mysterious but beautifully so. Our hunger is always met. Our thirst is always quenched. God is hope.
