Chris is a honorable friend who deals in the exquisite beauty and essence of things. Today, during a corporate worship setting online, a worship leader uttered an easy, low-hanging fruit from a phrase that is commonly used.
The phrase was innocuous enough.
“We are all in this together.”
However, it has been drilled and repeated and used as a basis for establishing a controlling agenda that he had to say something. And I am with him, BECAUSE as leaders of followers of Yeshua, we have a dearth and no shortage of poetic, imagistic, lovely, and divers things to say as comfort and you use a socially-conditioned phrase. Are we as followers of Yeshua, Jewish and Christian, so devoid of original thought that we have to resort only to a half-dozen banal things? That we have to let the government tell us what to say because it is easily-accessed and we have to expend little effort to say something.
Chris writes:
Its on every television commercial, news cast and now the tip of everyone’s tongue, including the church, and its nothing more than social conditioning.
Saying it within the context of worship is filthy defilement, plain and simple.
For all of the powerful, poetic and faithful sayings available to us in scripture, that’s all you’ve got? Blows my mind.
Part of my job as a believer, and part your job as a believer, follower of Christ, is to, in the words of Tiffany Dupont, wonder at the loss of “the thought well-thought, the word well-spoken, and the deed well-done. As in the great books.”
And also, part of our job is to not become part of that loss.
When we settle in our speech, word, thoughts, and deeds for the idiocies the culture or government or institutions hand us, we assist in the decay.
Push against the lexical decay, gang. Push for and express some original thought.
And resist the pressure to conform.
By the way, just because I said something or agreed with something does not mean you have to.
As a disclaimer, I want you to each to be free to take what I say, write, or agree with here and run it through your own grids of interpretation and application.
This may not work for you. I do know some of my friends tire of the idea of the government control, and you can jettison that thread if you wish, or keep it if you wish.
The big bottom line here is I want each of you to cultivate the skillet of having the capacity to skillfully express things in your own words, and resist the temptation toward letting others do the thinking for you.
Be blessed, gang.
Still sizzling over this z few days later. Shows the unregenerate world that we have no more hope than they do.