There’s this point in life that we all come to where status quo just isn’t enough. It’s the day that you wake up and realize that you aren’t satisfied just fitting in and you start to question the life you are living. It’s not about trying to find out if you are wrong as much as it is trying to find out why you follow what others do or expect you to do. We all go through it to some extent. For some of us it happens early in life when we purposely start to act differently than others, usually because it’s fun. For others it hits in the teen years as we are questioning “Why should I follow the establishment” and the anarchist comes out in us. For some of us, though, it happens after we’ve lived our lives pretty much following the crowd. We go to work dressed like our peers, do our work, and go home. We all listen to the same radio stations. We watch the same tv shows so that we have something to talk about. We drive certain cars because those are what successful people drive. We share restaraunts, clothing stores, movies, coffee shops, sports teams, entertainment venues, hobbies, places to live, children’s names, and a thousand other aspects of our lives with the ideals that society gives us that have been catagorized as “acceptable”. We even see it in the midst of our presidential elections that become popularity contests instead of actual concern for who would be our greatest leader. Why, then, would we not follow the same pattern with our spirituality?
Now, if you’re the type of person who beats their own drum and then marches wherever their heart leads then this really doesn’t relate to you. You probably find this writing quite confusing. For the other 99% of the population. though, we’ve just hit a nerve. For thousands of years there has been acceptable and unacceptable. If you looked like the majority of society then you were accepted. If you didn’t then you were ridiculed or someone tried to change your look to fit in. (Wouldn’t want the to feel like an outcast, now would we?) We praise individuality when it creates a new trend, but the oddball in the group is not seen as being “individualistic”. They are simply weird. In most areas of our lives the crowd rules.
We’ve done the same thing with our churches and most religions. There’s a look, a feel, an acceptable way of doing things. It gives us comfort. We try not to paint outside the lines too much because then we have to answer questions about why we want to change something that already works. We start to use terms like “truth”, “absolute truth”, “inherent”, and “the way God intended it” so that we have a rock to stand on whenever someone comes along that thinks differently than we do. You can’t argue with truth, now can you? Our organizations take on a certain look where people start to dress and talk in ways that make them easily identifiable. Our places of worship are creations cut from the same stone. They might not look exactly the same, but they all take on the same format and basic design. We’ve even created new designs to get away from that but have now developed a new standard of duplication.
Some of us find eventually that following this pied piper type of living doesn’t work for us. It’s a rather liberating, but scary prospect. The thought of walking away from the things you’ve held dear and forging into the unknown can strike fear in even the strongest of hearts. It means leaving alot of the relationships that you knew before. Well, that is, it means leaving the ones that just don’t (or don’t want to) understand. It also means changing your way of thinking. “Perhaps the things we did before weren’t as important as I thought they were.” But it also means opening yourself up to a whole new world of relationships and experiences that you would never have had before.
And here’s where it gets REALLY interesting……
Continued in Part 3
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