Matt W Cook

Do you remember this one?  It was always one of my favorites.  It still is and I want to tell you why.

You have Larry, a picture of a normal Christmas observer.  He wants to honor Santa.  With what does he honor Santa?  With cookies, because that’s what he’s good at.  But things don’t turn out the way he expects.

Instead of Santa, evil people show up, planning to do him harm.  But, as a faithful follower of the spirit of Christmas, he gives good gifts in return for their evil intent, thus winning them over.  That and that alone stands out and shouts a seriously Christ-centered worldview.  Yay for VeggieTales.

But then things get complicated.

Santa, the figurehead of Christmas, shows up, full of good intents for Larry.  But then he sees the robber and viking.  His response?  Threats and violence!  “No one messes with Santa!”  The deep, glorious worldview that Larry was living out is denied by its figurehead.  I can’t help but think of the West and the Western Church.  We are looked upon as the beacon of Faith and Jesus, yet when we have an opportunity to do something for someone who doesn’t earn it, we drop the ball.  We love those who love us and punish the rest.  We’re Santa, a fool in a red suit who only helps the ‘nice’.  Larry hardly exists.

I’d rather be Larry.

But what about the IRS guy?  Larry slams the door on him.  Why?  Why did the IRS guy earn a cold shoulder when the violent viking and crafty bank robber got yummy cookies?

I find myself thinking that the IRS guy represents official religious convention.  The letters and the law.  The strict adherence to dead form.  Larry won’t let that into his house.

Yet I find myself thinking that, in Santa’s book, the IRS guy would have gotten endorsement.

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What I’ve noticed:

• Meat, when rare, is a delightful thing!
• Anything, even homemade bread, can be bad when you eat too much.
• My mind works ten times better with a decent diet and no distractions.  And when it works better, all of life suddenly becomes a little bit easier.
• I feel like it would work a bit better with well-regulated distractions.
• Devoting yourself to a challenge publicly makes it a little easier than if you did it alone.
• Dark chocolate is a better friend than coffee ever was.
• The hardest itches last only a week.  If you want to do something that you don’t really want to do, just get through a week.  It’s easier after that.
• When your spouse is behind you, you feel like you can do almost anything.  And, suddenly, you end up actually doing it.  I would assume that when your spouse is not behind you you can’t really get much done.  But I wouldn’t know.  That’s never happened.
• When you push yourself to do something that you don’t really want to do, you end up learning interesting things about yourself.

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One of the most interesting places in the Harry Potter universe is St Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries.  The tour the reader get in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is incredible.  You get the impression that the Healers at St Mungo’s are pretty much capable of handling any injury or illness that comes their way.  Broken arm?  Fixed in seconds.  Lost limbs?  Regrown easily.  Nearly anything short of death can be cured at St Mungo’s.

Suddenly, after reading this, I had a deep feeling of animosity for the wizards and wizard culture in the Harry Potter universe.  Can you guess why?

If they can cure so much, why aren’t they curing AIDS in Africa?  Why aren’t they curing polio in Egypt?  Why aren’t they using their amazing powers to make the world a better place?  I mean, can you imagine what a wizard could accomplish in a country like India where 217 million people aren’t getting enough to eat?  What a bunch of jerks these wizards are, eh?  Blessed with supernatural powers, they hoard it all and keep the blessings to themselves.

Sadly, it kinda reminds me of the Church.

What do we have?  Money, education and (apparently) the almighty power of God.  That’s what we have.  How do we use it?  The vast majority of our money is spent on ourselves (this includes the money we give to the church).  We use our education to make ourselves more money.  And the almighty power of God that we claim can move mountains and change the world?  We use that for singing.

Let’s get out of St Mungos, out of Hogwarts, and into the world.  There is so much pain that can be cured, if only we are willing to cure it.

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 I opened my clothing drawer today.  It’s hard to find stuff in there.  I have to dig around and stuff always seems to spill out.  Today a thought hit me while I was rummaging: How many clothes do I have?  I had to find out.  Here it is:

To me, that seemed like a lot.  I mean, how many clothes does a person need?  I started wondering if my Wellness Challenge had anything to say about the clothing I owned?  Isn’t it better to own what I need and be rid of the rest?  Doesn’t the man with two shirts have a responsibility to give his extra one away?

So I fell into purge mode:

What do I have left?  Three pants, four T-shirts, four collared shirts…not much else.  All I need.  The rest of my wardrobe?  In separate bags headed for Pakistan and goodwill.

What do you have in your closets that you don’t need?  What do you have that someone else might need?

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Do you know what that is?  That’s homemade bread, baby.  And not just homemade bread, but homemade raisin bread with a glaze of honey and topped with sesame seed.

My good buddy Ben bakes bread all the time.  You should go over to his house.  Whatever he’ll feed you is like the happiest day of your life – in your mouth.  I stood in awe of his bread-baking abilities.  He’s like a super-hero.  And then he told me it was easy.

“Easy?!” quoth I to self.  “Easy!  Surely not!  Surely you’re putting on that false modesty that makes me feel like a loser for not having that magical ability to make my own bread.  Grr!”

For months I thought about how wonderful it would be to make my own bread.  For months I toyed with the idea, looking up ingredients and imagining the horrible, day-long process it would take to make a loaf that probably would turn out to be crud.

I looked at the ingredient list from the cookbook.  It looked pretty simple, actually.  Then I looked at the ingredient list of a normal loaf of bread from the supermarket.  Quite different!  It looked like something Professor Snape would put into his potions.  And then I started the Wellness Challenge.  I imagined that I shouldn’t be eating anything I couldn’t pronounce or identify at sight.

So I caved.  I rolled up my sleeves, grabbed the ingredients and make some bread.

Ben was right.

I was shocked.  After 15 minutes of work, I was practically done.  And I didn’t even use a breadmaker!  How did it turn out?  Well…within eight hours the entire loaf was gone.  And that glorious picture of the raisin bread of glory?  That was my second try.  Boo ya!

What does this mean?  It means that it’s not hard to do it yourself!  Why did it seem so hard?  Because I (like you) have been born and raised in a culture where we never do things for ourselves!  We never make real food!  We never do our own work!  Heck, with the rise of video games and MMORPGs, we don’t even use our own imaginations!

Make some bread!  Do something yourself!  It’s better for you.  It’s better for the world.  It’s just plain better!

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Last week Ruth and I watched Outsourced.  Ever heard of it?  Probably not.  I think it’s an Indie film.  Which is funny, because it’s about India (Indie Indian?).   Blockbuster only had one copy.  I picked it up on a whim, because of the cover.  I read the back and found out that the protagonist was a guy named Todd Anderson.  I have a good friend named Todd Anderson, so I took it as a sign and got the movie.

We were not disappointed.

I swear, the people who made the film must have been stuck in India or Pakistan at some point because they were able to perfectly capture the feelings and struggles of a white guy in a small town in India.  Todd’s struggles as he tries to stay American are marvelous.  Get the movie.  It’s great (especially you, Todd.  You’ll love it).

About half-way through the movie Todd, who is stuck in India, gets so fed up with the culture and food that he takes a five-hour taxi ride to the main city so he can get a cheeseburger at McDonald’s.  When he fails at this he almost snaps.  But then another American steps in and gives him some advice.  He tells Todd to stop fighting.  Stop struggling and just give up.  Stop resisting India and India will stop resisting you.  If you can’t be an American in India, stop trying so hard to be American.  Give in.

And so Todd does.  And, suddenly, he’s happy.

That’s great advice for travelers.  It reminds me of a great ad I saw: Don’t be a tourist.  Be a traveler.  You will hate any country you visit if you try to make that country into the one you came from.  You will hate it if you continually compare it to your own.  Instead, give up.  Don’t fight India (how could you?  You’re in India, for crying out loud).  Instead, accept it, and it will accept you in return.

The same thing happened to us in Pakistan.  While I was at war with Pakistani custom and climate, I was miserable.  But as soon as I gave up, grew a beard and tried to enjoy the unique things that Pakistan had to offer (without comparing it to my beloved Canada), I began to love it.  So much, in fact, that I sit here longing to be back there.

If you’re going to travel, consider it like an arranged marriage.  You won’t fall in love immediately.  Rather, you’ll need to learn to love.  And you’ll never learn to love your new wife if you are always comparing her to your mother.

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Have you ever seen the documentary, ‘Super-size me’?  You’ve probably heard of it.  A man decides to see what would happen if, for a month, he lived on nothing but what McDonald’s had to offer.  He tried everything on the menu at least once and had three full meals a day.  At the beginning of the experiment he was in top physical condition.  At the end he had gained about 35 pounds, had sexual dysfunction and mood swings and got some liver damage.

We weren’t surprised.  None of us were.

Because we all know how bad fast food is.  Every one of us understands that poor food choices are going to rob us of health and happiness.  We know that a triple Baconator will make us feel like crap.  Just like we know that five hours of World of Warcraft will take away our productivity and clean conscience.  Just like we know that useless and banal entertainment will have bad effects on our lives.  We know all this.  We know that if we choose the easy, unproductive things, we will regret it.  And yet we choose those things.  We still choose Big Macs over spinach salads.  We still choose soap operas over Charles Dickens.  Why?

What is it about good things that offends us so much?  Why do we have that deep, settled feeling of resistance against anything that is inherently good?  Seriously, what gives?  Wouldn’t we be much better off if we chose the good?

Wouldn’t we?

I want to know.  I want to know what it’s like to actually live according to the rules we seem to be made for.  So I propose an experiment.  The Wellness Challenge.

For the next month, I will endeavour to do the opposite of what Super-size Me did.  Instead of subjecting my body to everything I know will hurt me, I will subject my body, creativity, relationships and spirituality to those things that I am told will be good for me.  And, at the end of it all, I will see if it has made any improvement on my quality of life.

I will focus on a couple elements from four parts of life:

1. Physical Wellness
• I will endeavour to eat only things that common sense deems ‘healthy’.  I don’t think there’s a huge need to do great amounts of research here.  We all know that veggies are good and beef, pork, sugar, caffeine, salt and all other yummy things are bad.  If it ain’t healthy, I don’t eat it.
• I will endeavour to exercise every day.  I’m not talking about doing a marathon, just a half hour a day of some useful exercise.  I’m pretty sedentary now, so this feels like a big step.
2. Creative / Mental Wellness
• I will refuse any form of entertainment that is shallow, trite, or otherwise mentally / creatively unfulfilling.  This includes a lot of movies and, I think, pretty much all video games (argh!).  And whatever entertainment I do deem worthy, I will use with strict moderation.
• I will endeavour to dive into mentally / creatively stimulating projects.  I don’t know what they will be quite yet, but with all the free time I’ll have from my video game fast, I’m sure I’ll think of something.
3. Relational Wellness
• I will endeavour to have meaningful time with my family everyday.  Duh!
• I will endeavour to have meaningful time with friends and neighbours often.  This is important because we live in the West (for now) and in the West we tend to avoid people.  Bad trend, gotta fix it.
4. Spiritual Wellness (I wanted to call this something else, because everything is spiritual.  I almost called it mystical…but it sounded funny)
• I will endeavour to kick my prayer life up by three notches (vague, I know.  But I know what I mean by three notches, so no worries).
• I will endeavour to produce what I’ve called a ‘Jesus-aura’.  That is, I will try to live a life that is so saturated with Jesus that people come up and ask, ‘Hey, I notice that all of your hope and trust seems to be placed somewhere different from where mine is.  Could you please give me a reason for the hope that is in you?’  Of course, I should have been doing this already…

So there you have it.  As the creator of Super-size Me destroyed his body so that we could see how bad it is to choose McDonald’s, so I will endeavour to live the best life possible so that you, too, may see how great it is to live this way.  Pretty noble of me, eh?

But, what are the odds of all this working?  I don’t know.  I have a pretty good idea of how messed-up I am, and these things don’t look very attractive to me.  As I see it, the only way I will be able to last a month in the first three is if Jesus gives some serious help.  And as for the fourth one…yeah.  Serious, serious help needed.

But I’m going to go for it anyway.  I didn’t realize that it was New Years when I came up with this, but it’s fitting, isn’t it?  Let’s see if living well translates into well living.  And I really hope Jesus helps me, because otherwise, I’m screwed.

But aren’t we all?

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Harry Potter and Mr. Weasley were on their way to the Ministry of Magic. They were taking the subway. Mr. Weasley, a man not accustomed to travelling with non-magical people, stood amazed at the technology. For a moment he stopped dead in front of a ticket dispenser, awe-struck.
“Isn’t it amazing?” he asked Harry.
“But Mr. Weasley,” Harry said. “It’s broken.” He pointed to the out-of-order sign.
“I know, but still.”

I know it’s broken. But still. I know it doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to work. Indeed, it hardly seems to have any use at all. But still. The ingenuity. The originality. The sheer usefulness of the thing. Though it does not work, yet I am in awe of what it stands for. Of what it could be.

I believe human nature is broken. If you really think about it, you’ll agree. We have so many destructive desires and tendencies. Yes we kill and hate. Yes we are ignorant and undiscerning. Yes we take and destroy and pervert. But still.

But still we are human. Still we are the images of God. Still we have his spark, his life.

Don’t get so worked up over human depravity that you forget to stand in awe of what we have been made to be. Yes we are, like Jeremiah said, desperately sick and wicked. But still.

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Joe and I just finished watching The Empire Strikes back (again). With any good movie there are new things that stick out every time you watch. Two lines stuck out to me this time.
Han: Then I’ll see you in hell!
…
Lando: It’s not my fault!

So Han Solo finds out that his buddy Luke is lost somewhere in the cold night of Hoth, ready to freeze to death. What does he do? He sets off to find him, of course. And then one of the deck officers tells Solo that the temperature is dropping so rapidly that he’ll be dead before he gets very far.
At that point, what would you do? I thin most of us would say something like, “Seriously? Dead before the first marker? Well…shoot. Now what do I do?” We’d waffle. We’d hesitate. But Han rarely hesitates. He shoots back, “Then I’ll see you in hell!” and kicks his tauntan, riding into the snowy twilight.
Han looks at the prize (his friend’s life), looks at the cost (his own life) and makes a call. I’ll go to hell before seeing my friend left alone in the dark.

Now move near the end of the film. We see Lando, Han’s old buddy, betray him to Vader and Boba Fett. He eventually has a change of heart (quite a bit too late) and rescues Leia and Chewie. As they blast away from cloud city they find out, at the worst possible moment, that the hyperdrive is down. How does Lando respond?
“It’s not my fault!”

Friends, maybe. But very different people. Han sees a problem and throws his life on the line to fix it. Lando sees a problem and his first thought is to abdicate responsibility for it. Which one would you rather have at your side in a blaster fight?

Or a church?

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    I’m cursed with a great imagination.  Give me a situation am I can very clearly picture myself in it.  It’s creepy sometimes.

    For example, I can picture the glimmer of hope a prisoner on the way to Auschwitz would feel upon reading the sign that stood over the gate: Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Shall Set You Free.
    I can picture myself turning that over in my head.  True, the stories have said that no one was ever set free, but the sign!  The sign says that work could set me free!  Perhaps, if I just work the hardest…

    And I can picture that sign and those words driving me to work harder than anyone else.  I can picture seeing my friends being exterminated and reasoning with myself, “They didn’t work hard enough, that’s all.  I’ll work harder.”
    I can picture my body deteriorating as I worked it to its breaking point.  Again, I would reason with myself, “It’s a test.  I must pass it.  Work shall set me free.”

    Months would pass.  I’d outwork them all.  Finally I would be taken away from the other inmates.  I’d be led away, all the while thinking that all my work had finally paid off.  But then they’d herd me into that building from which I had never seen anyone leave.  And in my last moments of life I’d be raising my confused protest, “But I worked!  You said that work would set me free!”

    I think that the door to religion has the same sign over it.  Work, and you will be free.  And so we work.  We sacrifice.  When our friends fall, we say they didn’t work hard enough.  When trials come, we say we just need to work harder.  But work cannot set us free.  It never could.  If is could, most of us would be free already.

    The Truth sets you free.

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