The Future Soon...

A few weeks ago, our church had a talent show (an annual part of our culture, which is really cool). I had been told several times since I've been here that all of the pastor's participate. So I prepared something. I found out on the night, that I was the only pastor doing anything. I'm a sucker.

I sang a song called "The Future Soon" by Jonathan Coulton. It's really a funny song, essentially telling the inner thoughts of someone who is perhaps in 5th grade, having been rejected by a girl, and how he sees the future playing out. It's a really silly song that is funny and sweet.

I sang the song not in Jonathan Coulton's style, but in The Adventurers Club style (an amazing place in Walt Disney World that sadly is no longer there) which is far dorkier and sweeter. Whenever I get the chance, I'll post video of it. It was quite fun.

All of that is a long way to go to get to the notion of the song that intrigues me. The notion comes from the chorus, and got me going on a line of thought that was far more theologically probing than the song itself even begins to be. It is just a silly song. The chorus of the song goes like this:

It's gonna be the future soon.
I won't always be this way,
when the things that make me week and strange
get engineered away.
It's gonna be the future soon.
I can see it all so clear.
When my heart is breaking
I just close my eyes and it's already here.

I really like that phrase, "it's gonna be the future soon." It's so optimistic. It gets to this sense of looking beyond where we are and trying to strive for the "not yet." In that way, it's very similar to how Christians should look at the world. This notion that the thing that we are living for is not here yet, but it's coming. Not maybe, but definitely. If it's not hear yet, that doesn't mean that it's not coming, that just means that it's not "the future" yet.

God doesn't promise the world to be perfect life in the here and now. In fact, quite the oppisite. All too often though, I think that Christianity is sold as such. Prosperity gospel. Get saved and start rolling in the blessings. That's not how it works. But that doesn't change the promise. Yes, there are immediate blessings, but you still have to deal with crap and suffer, because we don't live in a perfect world, we live in a broken world, and we are still subject to the effects of that brokenness. But we don't follow Christ to get a reward. We follow Christ because Christ offers salvation - Christ offers a future. Without that future, all you have is this, and this isn't really all that great. It's broken. The future is fixed. The future is perfect.

In 1st Corinthians 13, Paul puts it this way:

8But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. ¹¹When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. ¹²Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

The promise is that it's going to be the future soon, and things are all going to work out then. If everything isn't working out yet, than it's not the future yet.

...when my heart is breaking, I just close my eyes and it's already here.

Inspired by...

When my sister Tobyn and I were younger, we made a lot of videos that were rather pointless. At the time, we thought they were hilarious and ground breaking. They weren't really either. When I watch them now, I see that they now are hilarious again, yet for different reasons.

There is a weird kind of humor that kids age 5-10 have that is really intriguing. They are beginning to understand the elements of humor, but aren't quite adept yet at implementing it. Often times that results in jokes that make no sense or things being "funny" to them that aren't actually funny at all. Other times, though. It results in genius.

I would put this video in the latter category:


For my Facebook friends, this is the video that I'm talking about.

click here (Hulu) if the video didn't show up.

Two Blogs in One.

Two things:

1.
I have renamed the blog "blue percent." I like that better than the overly wordy previous title, so it's a bit easier to refer to. The name comes from my feelings about one of our American colloquialisms that annoys me to no end: "110%"

The notion of giving 110% of your effort to something is a notion that some coach somewhere came up with to emphasize that their players need to give all that they have, and even more than they think they have. I'm sure that coach thought he/she was clever. The real problem (where it becomes annoying to me) is that the notion of 110% has now become the new benchmark for how much effort is expected from coaches. For someone to be giving 100% effort is not good enough. I have even heard coaches sometimes one upping the 110% and going with 115% or even 120%. That's a lot of effort.

The problem with this whole thing is that it is 100% irrational (or 110% irrational). By definition, 100% of anything is the most one can give of something. if we are going to start requiring more than that scale, suddenly our the parameters that we are using to judge by make no more sense. Why not give 100,000,000% or even (wait for it)... blue %. The second we step outside of the mathematical limitations set by measuring something by percentage, we have eliminated all logical understanding of what is being asked of us, and by that standard, blue percent makes as much sense as 110 percent.

end diatribe.

2.
I was cleaning out the cat litter today (irrelevant to the point I'm about to make), and I started thinking about how much the younger generation is taught to view everything as have a subjective bias, and that there are little more vestiges for objectivity. I think the internet has a lot to do with this.

I came to this conclusion when I was thinking of reading up more on the creationism/evolution debate. I have pretty comfortable conclusions on this (I don't think that the two need to be in competition, and that ultimately they are fairly symbiotic - God uses evolution as a means of creating things), but I was wanting to learn more about the arguments for both angles.

I first thought of getting some books on the subject, but then thought that I'm sure that the internet has some valid resources. The problem with the internet is that it is hard to discern whether a source is "valid" or not, meaning that internet sources often have dubious sources, or no sources at all. The material found therein is basically subjective to that particular person's point of view. It is all too easy to put material online (case in point - this blog).

Books always felt like they had to go through a more rigorous process to get published, that the "facts" in a book had to go through more people's scrutiny before they were printed. Now, I'm not naive enough to believe everything that I read in books, as I know that there are plenty of completely false things and shady facts printed in books. by and large, though, they felt more trustworthy.

As we as a society are becoming concurrently more paperless and more skeptical, and emphatically encouraged to be both, I wonder if we will ever be able to recapture that sense of validity and concreteness in the things that we learn.

Our inherent need to learn more and understand the things around us is being corroded by a doubt that has now been cast over any piece of information that we have been given. Perhaps nowhere is this more prevalent than in political media, where two people can argue diametrically opposing points, citing "hard facts" that are immediately dismissed without regard by the other side. No evidence is needed to dismiss said facts, we can just assume that there is a bias, and that's good enough for dismissal.

The whole thing is eroding our ability to communicate, to have any common ground, and ultimately, our ability to actually learn anything concretely. When everything is an abstract, how can you build any sort of foundation?

The X-Files perhaps summed the duality of this human nature struggling against our cultural conditioning in two of it's most notable catch phrases:

"I want to believe."
"Trust no one."

Mr. Moon Swam.

I think that Kate Micucci is one of my new favorite singers.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOUEjiE6-Hk



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZXANhfSn9A