Full Plate and No Appetite

What’s going on? What’s important? What’s shaking? What do I have a deep and motivating opinion on?

Lots, of course! I got opinions out the wa-zoo (what a wa-zoo is and why my opinions are coming out of it, however, I fear I’ll never know).

I got an opinion on the recent series the Gospel Coalition did on “How Do We Work for Justice and Not Undermine Evangelism?” (Opinion: stupid question!)

I got an opinion on this neat little quote that precedes chapter 14 of Carl Sagan’s Contact. (“Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect…”)

I got an opinion on large, expensive church buildings and projects. (Feed dying people instead!)

I got an opinion on the style of preachers on WDCX. (“You need to follow Jesus more fully, buy these resources from us and we’ll tell you how!” Capitalism at it’s finest!)

I got an opinion of the popularity of shallow books like the Twilight series and anything written by Dan Brown. (Seriously, how did those get famous?)

I got an opinion on the way we use our magical technology. (The awesome powers of the cosmos at our fingertips so we can watch silly videos and share pictures with friends who will never look at them.)

I got an opinion on western employment habits. (40 hours is unnatural. Let’s give up some luxuries [like the 8-billion-dollar phone you only use to look at silly videos and share photos with friends who will never look at them] and spend more of our time being happy.)

I got an opinion on video games and movies. (The Horde always looks better than the Alliance and Star Wars is nothing like Star Trek.)

You want opinions? I got them. I got thousands of words worth of opinions. Nay, I say thousands of posts worth. You could spend half your life listening to my opinions (though I wouldn’t recommend it).

But I came to a stunning realization. Blogs and news and sermons are all, in the end, made of nothing but opinions. And yet we call it all content. As if it were something. As if it did something. Maybe it used to do something, back where there were a few, well-informed voices (though I have no idea when that was). But today I have so many opinions thrown at me I find I only have time to formulate my own opinions about those opinions and throw them back. And then I’m tired and go to bed.

That’s the problem with all my precious abstract conversations. Since they exist in the abstract, they don’t truly exist. Because it is only my faithfulness that is the substance of the things I hope for. It’s my faithfulness that proves what cannot be seen. And my faithfulness is nothing more or less than the logical outworking of what I’ve signed up for.

So my opinions about how churches spend their money is about a useless as my preference for the Horde over the Alliance, because while it remains inert and in my mind alone, it does not exist. Our opinions are a plate of food before us. And I fear we have forgotten how to eat.