Help! I'm in a Box and Can't Get Out!

When did life get so compartmentalized?


Today you have to make your choice between Oldies, Pop, R&B, Rock, Country, Christian, or talk radio. And you can’t mix them up, either. You make your choice and that’s the compartment you stay in, that becomes your identity. You’re an old fogie, a band-wagon groupie, a booty bouncer, head banger, red-neck, do-gooder, or a right wing extremist.

Why do we feel the need to separate everything and everyone into labels? With so many digital-age networking methods, that “bring us all together”, why do I see people more separated than ever? There’s the MySpace crowd, Facebook followers, Twitter tweets, and on and on. We have a thousand “friends” and very few relationships.

And it goes even further than that, with Italian Cuisine, Tex-Mex, Chinese buffet, fast food, dine-in, 20 items or less, self checkout, credit card only, cash only, express lane, truck lane, HOV lane, sedans, coupes, vans, SUVs, crossovers, soccer-moms, working-moms, gas powered, diesel, hybrid, Democrat, Republican, Independent, Apple, PC, Coke, Pepsi, iPhone, Blackberry, cable, satellite, HD, LED, Plasma, Christian, Atheist, Humanist, scientist, other…

All of these bubbles are reminiscent of a bad Lawrence Welk Show nightmare. All of these divisions of society are bouncing around, bumping into one another and never being allowed to actually connect. For such an enlightened, inclusive society, all I see are more labels, more separation, and more loneliness.

Wasn’t there a time when there was just one big bubble? You could use the term “American” to mean “all of the above”. The first friends I ever made in school were a brown boy named Roshan and an Asian kid named Vincent. We were quite the 3 amigos, not knowing anything about ethnic pride or racial prejudice. We were just buddies. That’s all. Not too long ago they used to play gospel music right along songs about love, life, and the heartland. But now, you’ve got to keep those things separated. We don’t want our religion bucket spilling over into our politics bucket or our entertainment bucket.

I was at a community music event this past weekend where they were playing some of the best blue-grass music I’ve heard in a long time. (Now, don’t go shutting me out because you don’t like blue-grass. Remember, resist that bubble mentality.) They started singing an old gospel song about knowing who holds the future and that He holds my hand, right in the middle of songs about living in a hollow and about foxes running wild. A little lady in front of me snuck her hand in the air and began to worship God a little right there in that old courthouse building. I caught myself thinking, “Now, is that appropriate?” But then it hit me, why not? Why can’t we love Jesus at the same time we are loving our country, our homes, and our families? The way I see it, isn’t the love of Jesus supposed to touch all of those other things as well anyways?

Let’s do this, shall we? How about we break everything down to its most common denominator and group it as such? Let’s make just one big category out of it all and just call it what it is, LIFE. And then, let’s crawl out of our tiny bubbles into that one big bubble. Feels kinda nice, doesn’t it? It’s roomy in here. And you know what happens when a bunch of people get into that one big bubble together? Well, a whole lot of Life… together. I think I heard it called “abundant life” somewhere.

What do you say?