Podcast Short: We Are a Mess

Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

We Are a Mess

We are a mess. We are a mess because we are a people on a mad rant. Sadly, we have become blinded to the fact that we are blinded by a host of pathetically self-serving agendas. And the pathetic nature of these agendas are evidenced by the fact that they are unable to stand up to the slightest scrutiny despite how rigorous our justifications of those agendas might be. We create a litany of agendas whose basis is indefensible, for any self-serving agenda will always be indefensible.

Therefore, we shut down anyone who wishes to do something as simple as dialogue with us about those agendas. The simple and potentially enriching exchange of differing ideas and perspectives is viewed as an inexcusably prejudiced and an entirely unwarranted threat. And such a radicalized stance is based on the insecurities of an agenda that is too weak to entertain anything other than its own indefensible platform. Therefore, we instantly shut down dialogue in order to side-step the painful reality that the agenda is simply too flimsy and too ill-conceived to be defended. And the fact that it cannot be responsibly defended calls into question the very legitimacy of the very agenda that has come to define who we are. For many, this then becomes horribly frightening as it also calls into question the very culture that they are desperately attempting to create that will grant them permission to live out an indefensible agenda.

The concept of personal rights is exercised to near insanity, resulting in demands for liberties that are far more about license to be what we are not, and to do what we should not. We have placed the desires of self over an abiding respect of the liberties that give us the ability to express those desires in the first place. Many in our culture have utilized scare tactics simply because reason cannot support these agendas, therefore it is assumed that fear will press resistant individuals to accept those agendas. We create paradigms that instantly and rather immediately renders anyone in opposition to these agendas as holding some sort of unacceptable bias or ignorant prejudice or ill-informed option that is immediately ruled as simply and utterly intolerable. Once these paradigms are forced upon these individuals, they are immediately labeled as the bane of the culture and unworthy of anything but to be deported to the far fringes of the culture where all of the ignorant and uninformed are banished. All the while, these unsustainable agendas tear at the very fabric of the culture, leaving these individuals entirely unaware that their self-declared and indefensible freedoms will be the destruction of those freedoms.

In it all, we are in desperate need of perspective; of clear, clean, fresh, and undiluted perspective free of bias and wiped clear of agendas. We are in desperate need of balance long lost. We are in desperate need of a recalibration that pulls us away from the insanity of a culture gone rogue, to a reality where things such as selflessness, and integrity, and truth, and morality, and sacrifice, and love for all are granted permission to run rogue and live rogue.

And to do that, we need to be shaken awake and slapped upside the head in order to open our eyes and re-engage a sense of common sense. We need to have something pull us out of our own heads for a moment in order to understand that ‘our own heads’ will only cause us to ‘head’ in all the wrong directions. We need something that will blow the walls off of the confining and selfish vision that our agendas hold us hostage to in order to understand our need to be liberated from our tiny agendas in order to help a world that’s held hostage to horrific things that completely shame our tiny agendas. We need to be broken open, shaken from slumber, rocked out of our mediocrity, shamed by our laziness, humiliated by our greed, thrust out of our complacency, and brought to both our knees and our senses regarding who we’ve become verses who we should and can become.

And to do that, all we have to do is look at the world around us. All we have to do is to take our heads out of our ‘heads’ and look at the world around us. At war. At poverty. At oppression. At dictatorial leaders who enslave entire nations in unspeakable bondage. All that we have to do is to look at disease and those who have no means to fight it. At children picking through garbage heaps and people sleeping in boxes. At nations that recklessly invade other nations for reasons that are both pathetic and the stuff of political manipulation and power-mongering. At rampant crime that pillages the innocent in order to line the pockets of those who are not. At the hundreds of millions of people for whom an education is an impossible dream and food on the table a fading hope. Get out of your own head and look around. And once we do, we must keep looking ‘around until we have chosen to get out of our comfort zones and place our tiny, selfish agendas aside in order to step out into everything that’s ‘around.’ Look around. Get out of your head and look around. And then do something other than live to preserve an agenda that can’t stand on its own two legs, for there are seven and a half billion people out there, many of which need help standing on their own two legs.

“…if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

• 2 Chronicles 7:14