As Candace and I have been stumbling along this journey over the past year or so, I continually find myself coming back to one question: “Why do we do what we do?” I ask myself this all the time and I’ve really struggled with it. When we really start to question the daily activities of our lives, we find that we do many things simply because our society and culture has told us that this is ‘normal’. Most of us have never taken the time to question why this is normal, if there is a better alternative, or even if it lines up with the life God has called us to. Not only have we done this in our day-to-day lives but we’ve done it in the church as well. In ”Mustard Seed vs. McWorld” by Tom Sine, he states that “The American church, in its many expressions, seems to quietly accept modern culture’s demands on its members as a given and then content itself with whatever is left.”
This book has been refreshing, as he addresses this very question I have struggled with. He compares the biblical view of God’s kingdom, which Christ compares to a mustard seed, with the economic globalization of our age, which he calls McWorld. He states that, “It doesn’t seem to have occured to many of us that we are in no way obligated to accept all the arrangements modernity hands us.” As Candace and I have slowly tried to break the grip that our culture has on us, we have realized a few important things about ourselves. (1) The culture’s grip on us is tighter than we ever realized. (2) Once we began to taste a new alternative to the world, we realized that we NEVER want to go back. There’s no life in the materialism, individualism, and consumerism of modern culture.
So, I encourage you this week to simply ask yourself in certain situations, “Why am I doing this?” It’s both refreshing and convicting as we realize that in many ways we are modern society’s puppets. We need to join together and find a renewed, prophetic imagination to reclaim our lives and to experience the life that God has truly called us to.
