It’s a Small World After All

Does everything seem smaller to you? I know they say the world is shrinking because of the internet, high speed travel, and communications. That’s a good thing in many ways.

But I mean it differently. And in not such a good way.

When you look at this country’s political figures of the past like Lincoln, Kennedy, FDR, Reagan, and compare that to the group of candidates asking for our votes today it doesn’t inspire confidence, does it? In fact do any of them inspire anything other than melancholy? John Edwards? Hillary Clinton? Could you imagine Lincoln waffling on slavery like Rudy Giuliani contorts himself over abortion.

It seems to me that as our problems are growing bigger our leaders are becoming smaller. We seem to be suffering from a bad case of “Honey I shrunk the culture.”

Look at our movie stars of old. Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and Garbo. People love to say they were ahead of their time. I don’t think so. They were in a time when we were comfortable with big strong women. Compare them now to who? Demi Moore on a stripper’s pole? Lindsey Lohan in…does she even act anymore or just bar hop?

Compare the pint size Jimmy Cagney to Tom Cruise. John Wayne with Brad Pitt. Maybe we just know too much about our leaders and celebrities. YouTube has shown them too up close and personal to really look up to them.

But maybe it comes down to reverence. We just don’t believe in anything outside of ourselves anymore. Heck, Hollywood even eschewed, “Truth Justice and the American Way” from the latest installment of Superman.

We don’t believe we can be better because everything’s all so relative. I’m right and you’re right. Everyone is right except those who say we’re wrong.

I fear we even view God as a lifeline and not as… well…God. We use Him as a spiritual 911 call. When in trouble we dial God and then we go back to living when the crisis passes. We call ourselves spiritual instead of religious. Religion seems close-minded because of all of its rules. We live in a Rodney King “Can’t we all just get along” world.

I worry about my kids. I don’t think it was this bad when I was their age.

I took my children through a nature trail earlier this week. We threw bread to the ducks in a pond. We walked past a cornfield as the sun began to set. It was really one of those moments in life you store away in your memory because you haven’t wrung all the goodness out of it yet. The cornfield had been laid low over the winter but it had started growing again. My five year old said, “He’s doing it. He’s fixing it again.”

I asked what she meant. She explained that God was fixing the corn just like I told her He would when she was sad because it’d been knocked down. She nodded and said, “He’s doing a great job.”

There was reverence in her voice. And I want her to keep it. But I fear that they’re getting the kind of culture we deserve, not the kind they need. We just have to pray that God will help. We just have to pray and believe that He’ll fix it again.