- You can let someone else think for you. It will be very easy to choose your music/movies/books. Just check out the top ten lists and you will be in.
- You will not have to exert yourself, swimming against the current and all that. No more feeling different. Your clothing options will skyrocket when you switch the criteria from “Is it decent?” to “Is it sexy?”.
- You can say and do whatever you feel like and chalk it up to free speech, the in-thing, whatever. Stop worrying about what other people think. If they don’t affirm your lifestyle, they don’t belong in your life.
- You can relax your parenting. Let the government decide what your children should learn. Give them unlimited screen time. Don’t be so concerned about their innocence. They will figure things out.
- You will now be accepted as normal by the general population. Did I mention that you will no longer have to think? Someone else will do that for you and you can just imitate them.
I was raised in a culture that was deeply suspicious of any other culture. Many decisions about the rightness/wrongness of things seemed to be made by knee-jerk reactions. If someone “kosher” said it’s okay, it was okay, but we were not taught the “why” of things. It was a very insulated way to live and did not necessarily give us good tools for being discerning outside of our world.
Why do we live the way we do? What actually matters? I don’t want to mindlessly follow a way that seems right to me just because it is normal to me. Sometimes I find it very tiresome, being different in my core values. I am not afraid to examine them, to see whether they are really truth. (I am speaking in first person here, but my husband and I do these examinings together. Just so you know. 🙂 )
A teacher from my youthful days told us, “When faced with a choice, the person who loves God usually has to take the harder route. The easier way is rarely the right way.”
I keep thinking about this. Is it true? Does God want us to make choices that way?
Tomorrow: Believe it or not, there is more… just one more post, I think.
wocket in my pocket 
Well, I am enjoying this conversation! I guess I will keep chiming in if you don’t mind. There are the verses about the way being narrow to be sure and sometimes God does ask us to do some very hard things. For myself it was a number of those hard things that had caused me to see God in the wrong light. Perhaps even Anabaptist history, surviving hardships has affected their over all view of God’s ways. Recently, God directed us to a very special season of life and I almost couldn’t enjoy it because I found myself wondering, “Could this be God’s leading, because I am enjoying it so much?” I was shocked by this revelation, and had to repent. How would I feel if my children viewed me this way just because I sometimes ask hard things of them for their better good? I mean really, “This couldn’t be from my mom because all she does is give me chores!” How ridiculous. God has been showing me more of Himself such as, in His presence is fullness of joy, at His right hand there are pleasures forevermore, and that if we delight ourselves in Him, He will give us the desires of our hearts. Personally, I do not think it is an accurate view of God to assume the hard thing is the right thing, and this is a bad premise for making decisions. I have done it lots of times myself though. It reminds me of the time as a very small girl when I let peach juice pour over a cut though it stung badly. I figured it must be good for the cut since it hurt, and that was similar to what peroxide felt like. Equal pain, but one could help heal wounds and the other other would make them infected.
Of course I don’t mind. 🙂 It’s good to hear from you. These types of posts are never very popular, but sometimes I like to mix things up. I enjoyed hearing your perspective. Right now I need to choose the harder thing and go make supper instead of messing around. 😉
I think, like Elizabeth alluded to, that I used to have an idea that “God’s will” would be something hard and unlovely, something I didn’t want to do. I don’t think that way anymore. As far as life choices are concerned, I think God planted natural desires and talents in me that I should appreciate and use.
I know as far as lifestyle, though, what God says in His Word almost always runs contrary to popular culture. To any culture really–maybe even our own in certain aspects.
I’ve considered adopting “pop culture” I mean, I am quite tired of not being able to find tshirts that have actual necklines not navel lines, and I do have to admit that homeschooling is far more effort then what just sending them to public school would be. Hmmmmm,
Ps.when are you going to write about “following ones heart” and “the ones who think they are beautiful, are”.