Truman Show

Still trying to make sense of my experience of belonging to a big church for the last 9 years, only to find myself now searching for something very, very different.

There’s something about belonging to a mega-church that’s like being Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. When things don’t add up, no one seems to notice. Maybe it’s that there’s something appealing to people about being identified with a big, slick organization, and we respond the same way we respond to a commercial: “I want it.” We don’t ask the hard questions, and we don’t stop to figure out whether the product delivers on its rhetoric. That’s the choice we make (once again a choice reflecting the “having” orientation in life), and it ends up shaping us into the strange, giddy, sloganized people smiling brightly and surrounding Truman in his artificial world.

So I’m not that. I’ve chosen to belong to the true Kingdom, and a recent assertion of that choice was to follow God out of a place that had begun to seem more image than substance. While I’m certain God is guiding, I’m not sure I can claim to be the princess in George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin–following the protective, guiding thread given her by a grandmother no one else can see, and perceptible only to her own fingertips. And though I hope God’s plan in this chapter includes others (like my children), I’m not sure I can claim to be valiant like she is, led along through dark caverns and saving other heroes.

At the opposite extreme, I’m aware of the danger of becoming a goblin like the ones in the story–driven underground, bitter, disfigured, proud, disconnected from the daylight world and the reality of others.

I’m somewhere in between.