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I heard a story about a girl who was a victim of child pornography. The perpetrator of the crime was a pastor at the girl church. As I heard this story I felt a righteous anger rise up within me. Various other stories of pastor and church leaders that have committed terrible atrocities against those in the flock began to come to mind and I was furious. I wasn’t angry at them however, I was angry at myself. I was angry at the church as a whole.
How far have we fallen to allow such things to happen? Where is the righteous anger that should rise up within in the christian to say, that’s not right and we need to fix it? I add the last part because it is the real issue that angers me. There are more than enough ‘christians” who will stand up and say that something or someone is wrong. Where are the christians who will actually attempt to change the root of the issue. Where are those who will confront the cause of the sin and remove it so that the flock can prosper. It seems we are simply content to call those who stumble hypocrites and then continue on with our walk.
There is a much deeper issue here than a man struggle with pornography. There are much deeper issues than people having affairs or being addicted to drugs. Don’t get me wrong, these are all serious problems but the real issue is why did they still struggle with those things. Why didn’t someone know about the issue? Why has the church, the one place we should all feel accepted and welcome, become a place where we feel the need to hide the most?
It seems strange but if you want to find the people who are the most honest about who they are don’t bother looking at a church. Instead try a bar, or a crack house. Why is it you ask? It’s simple, the church is no longer a place of refuge it is a place of judgement and condemnation. We have presented the image of perfection to the world. “Come here and join us and all you problems will go away.” What you end up with is a large group of people who feel like they are second rate because they have problems even after joining. Instead of talking about it they hide it so that they don’t get ridiculed.
What would have happened if the man who struggled with child pornography had been open about his struggle? I fear in most cases he would have been judged harshly and cast aside as one who was not walking the right way. What should have happened to him though? He should have been embraced as a brother who was struggling. There should have been those who came alongside him and helped him to bear the burden, helped him to finally be free from the sin that had ensnared him. The man wanted to be fee but he didn’t know he could be. Even if he knew he could be free, he didn’t know how to be and had no one there to help him.
I write this not to throw stones but to confront the truth that we have, as a church culture, created an atmosphere of darkness and called it light. If we don’t begin to remove the darkness and start walking in openness and transparency the sins that have invaded the church will consume the church. It is only in the light that we are able to become truly free.
Director Producer J.J. Abrams wanted to create an iconic monster that would rival the famed Godzilla and be more fierce and intense than the popular King Kong. After watching Cloverfield, I am not so sure that he has succeeded. The movie was solid but not exceptional and though the monster is terrifying I don’t think it’s the kind that will stick with me the way that Godzilla and King Kong have.
Cloverfield is told from the perspective of a small group of friends. While throwing a going away party for one of the group in NYC, there is a small earthquake and the power goes out. After rushing to the roof to see better what had happened, the group realizes that the city is under attack. They then rush out onto the streets to try to escape.
Once on the streets, the movie begins to draw on the tragedy of 9/11 to provoke sympathy from the audience. A building collapses sending a billowing cloud of dust and debris down the street, drowning the scene in darkness. Once the dust clears there are people wandering around covered with dust and some people are sitting on the curbs looking bewildered. While the scene is effective, it seems a bit to opportunistic with the 9/11 imagery.
What follows from here is the small group of friends trying to escape the city and then trying to save a friend who has been trapped. To save from spoiling the movie for those who have not seen it I will not include too many more details. I will say however, that the movie was well done and succeeded in holding my attention quite well in a genre that can become a bit boring to me at times.
The acting was almost unnoticeable, in a good way. The choice to film the movie with hand held cameras was the right one. You didn’t feel like you were watching a movie as much as you were a documentary, and that may be the best part of the movie. It felt like they were real people you were seeing experience the most horrific of tragedies and not actors and actresses following a script. The shaking camera, although at times gave me a headache, added realism to the movie that would otherwise been hard to achieve.
In the end, the monster seemed secondary and unimportant. I found myself only hoping that the friends would be able to escape and live their lives. The movie was intense and full of frightful scenes. It had its funny moments and its terrifying moments. As a movie I think that J.J. Abrams did a phenomenal job. However, at creating an iconic monster that would forever be ingrained in the minds of those who have encountered it, I think he failed.
What has happened to the quality of work in our culture?
A friend of mine wrote a post about the decline in sound quality that you should all check out. However, I think that the truth is that our “fast paced, hedonistic culture” has led to degradation in far more than just sound quality. I think that it has led to a lack of excellence in all aspects of culture today.
Excellence has been replaced by convenience and as a result we have more material (movies, books, song etc.) than ever before but the vast majority of it has no real discernible value. Most of, if not all of the works of today, could not hold a candle to the classics of yesterday.
God placed inside of us these incredible gifts of creativity to express and to communicate but due to our lack of stewardship of His gifts, due to our lack of hard work, we have far to often produced to a standard lower than we are capable. Even worse is that most people will never even realize that what they are reading, watching and listening to is not as good as it was meant to be.
That we would as a generation stop pursuing convenience and start pursuing excellence. It will be harder and it will require more commitment on our part but it will be worth it when we begin to create art that is able to stand the test of time, that is able to truly affect culture, because lets face it, what we have been creating up to now hasn’t gotten the job done.
After much prompting from a few close friends I have decided to embark on a dangerous voyage into the world of blogging. I have been told numerous times that I should be blogging. That I should be writing. It didn’t matter what I wrote just as long as I was writing. After putting it off for far longer than I should have, here I am.
“What’s the big deal?” you ask. “Why is it a dangerous voyage?” you question.
At first glance you would be right to question such statements. How could anyone be afraid to blog? It is simply writing your thoughts down on the internet. I fear it is much more than that however. It is allowing a part of me to be put out for the entire world, or at least the few who manage to read, to see. There is a fear that I have that what I write may be laughed at scorned or rejected by the reader. The comments may never appear, the site visits may dwindle to nothing and I will be left with a voice that only I can hear. That was a risk that I was unwilling to take until today.
I realize today that to avoid the risk would be far worse than failure. To never step out into the blogoshpere would be a tragic mistake that I would regret far the rest of my life. Failure lasts only as long as it takes to learn from the mistakes made. Fear of making a mistake however will last a lifetime. So today I risk failure…
