Living in fiction

You may have heard that, recently, a couple men found a Bigfoot corpse by a stream and froze the body in a chest freezer for later authentication. You may have also seen the press conference where they fielded questions from reporters from around the country about how they found it, what there plans were, the size of the beast itself, etc.  And, if you managed to suspend disbelief long enough to follow the story from last week to today, you know that the body was finally examined and the thawed carcass turned out to be (gasp)... a rubber costume.

I confess it makes me laugh a little. But more than that, it makes me wonder where I would have to be mentally to push a lie that far. I can see telling a campfire story and inflating it a little to help it along. You know, for effect. But to take it farther than a funny idea known to be a silly invention, all the way into meticulously creating false evidence, an entire account of its impact on my life- and then...inviting the media/world into the lie to scrutinize my story and inevitably find it to be what it is; untrue.

The only reason I can find for this kind of behavior, beyond an overdose of foolishness and a childish desire for attention, is willful boredom. Think about what's going on in the world right now. Think about all the beauty available to humanity. Google "US waterfalls" or "Monarch Butterfly migratory patterns". Get up on your roof and stare westward at about 8:30pm. The opportunities for creativity, beauty, art and a general celebration of life and its sacredness are endless. And the flip side; You know the stats on hunger, AIDS, poverty, war, injustice. You know that in every city in America tonight, the local evening news covered stories of fires, robberies, neglect, pain and instances of withheld love and exercised evil. 

Yet some people willfully block all of this out, choosing instead to live in the bubble of comfort, ease and predictability. They live in fiction, and measure the quality of their life by how much comfort they can maintain and how much reality they can avoid. But, how long can a person live as though God's reality has nothing to offer, no call to action, before they lose their minds? How long can a person pretend there's no world outside their safe and insulated routine before he or she has to freeze a Bigfoot costume to disrupt the boredom they've created?

I am reminded of a quote from Cornelius Plantinga's book "Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin"

“Making of career of nothing — wandering through malls, killing time, making small talk, watching television programs until we know their characters better than we know our own children — [not only] robs the community of our gifts and energies [but] shapes life into a yawn at the God and Savior of the world. The person who will not bestir [himself], the person who hands herself over to nothing, in effect says to God: you have made nothing of interest and redeemed no one of consequence, including me.” [pg. 188]

How does this shape our view of what it means to lead a Group? What should our Groups be and do? Is it one more spoke in a slow moving, wheel of boredom for people? Is it one more safe, predictable thing to put a check-mark next to and go to bed, wishing life carried more weight? Or is the group you lead someone's best shot at breaking out of their sedate bubbles of comfort, and into a world that needs people who embrace Christ and reality with both arms? How can we lead our people to recognize that the longing in their hearts for meaning and awe and adventure and challenge and things that demand faith and courage was put their by God's Spirit? If we can't go after that in LifeGroups, then where can we go after it?

We can do better than Bigfoot. There's something more than the fiction we settle for. We are invited to stir ourselves from our yawning and do the Kingdom of Heaven. Let's grab a few friends and live THAT story.

"I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly"

-Jesus