God stole my America...
Last night God was carving a piece out of me. Not in the physical sense - I'm not down a kidney or anything. But another piece of my working paradigm, the mesh of assumptions by which I have viewed and lived life, is being removed.
Any of you who know me will know that I've had a growing skepticsm of the set of values called the "American Dream." Its focus on comfort, its glorifying of entertainment, perhaps especially its assertion of materialism as the means to the majority of desireable ends - these all rung hollower the longer I knocked on their hallowed doors.
But what remained even as those values fell was the picture of the American Dream. Husband,wife, a couple touble-making but loveable kids living in the contentment of personal comfort and societal respect. The luxuries, the smiles - just picture it. I certainly have, and for the majority of my life have held that picture as a goal or aspiration. Not so much by my own conscious choosing, I just wasn't presented any other options. 'That,' said society to my young mind, 'is the best you can do.'
But ever so carefully God has been removing the values and assumtions that underly that picture, cutting the roots from it. And just last night He turned His scalpel to the picture itself. And a painful cut it was.
It was I who asked Him to make the incision, though. He would not have done it otherwise. I realized that the mountaintop that I was straining for had no mountain below it, was only a whisp of cloud, an illusion. I asked God to remove this picture of the perfect American life from my paradigm. But I didn't quite realize the rammifications.
All the things I had long assumed come with the American Dream - house, car, marriage, contentment, happiness - now found their lives solely in the picture. So many times had I seen these things in that idyllic context and so few times had they been presented to me outside of it that I could not picture them otherwise. This, by the way, is one of the great failings of the American Church, or at least my little niche of it.
So as God deftly began whittling away at the remnants of my imagined America I felt a greater loss than only that of a childhood dream. What I felt was the loss of hope.
As always, the only way to counter a lack of hope is by faith. I have faith, am slowly, prayerfully growing faith, that God will replace those things that I see him taking, and replace them with their betters. Until then, ouch God, but keep cutting.
Any of you who know me will know that I've had a growing skepticsm of the set of values called the "American Dream." Its focus on comfort, its glorifying of entertainment, perhaps especially its assertion of materialism as the means to the majority of desireable ends - these all rung hollower the longer I knocked on their hallowed doors.
But what remained even as those values fell was the picture of the American Dream. Husband,wife, a couple touble-making but loveable kids living in the contentment of personal comfort and societal respect. The luxuries, the smiles - just picture it. I certainly have, and for the majority of my life have held that picture as a goal or aspiration. Not so much by my own conscious choosing, I just wasn't presented any other options. 'That,' said society to my young mind, 'is the best you can do.'
But ever so carefully God has been removing the values and assumtions that underly that picture, cutting the roots from it. And just last night He turned His scalpel to the picture itself. And a painful cut it was.
It was I who asked Him to make the incision, though. He would not have done it otherwise. I realized that the mountaintop that I was straining for had no mountain below it, was only a whisp of cloud, an illusion. I asked God to remove this picture of the perfect American life from my paradigm. But I didn't quite realize the rammifications.
All the things I had long assumed come with the American Dream - house, car, marriage, contentment, happiness - now found their lives solely in the picture. So many times had I seen these things in that idyllic context and so few times had they been presented to me outside of it that I could not picture them otherwise. This, by the way, is one of the great failings of the American Church, or at least my little niche of it.
So as God deftly began whittling away at the remnants of my imagined America I felt a greater loss than only that of a childhood dream. What I felt was the loss of hope.
As always, the only way to counter a lack of hope is by faith. I have faith, am slowly, prayerfully growing faith, that God will replace those things that I see him taking, and replace them with their betters. Until then, ouch God, but keep cutting.
posted by James at 21:52
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