Sunday, October 11, 2009

no time for losers...

I wanted to write something.
Something deep, thought provoking.
Or funny, that would work to...
Or just delightfully random.

But I feel so dry and tired, I feel spent.
I spent time procrastinating
I spent time studying
I spent time stressing
I spent time with friends
I spent time at church
I spent time spending money
I spent time yelling at my mum
I spent time listening to queen
I spent time sleeping


'Science has shown that the way people think about cancer affects their ability to deal with the disease, thus affecting their overall health. Professor Spencer said that if he were to sit down with his family and tell them he had cancer they would be shocked, concerned, perhaps even in tears and yet cancer is nothing near the most deadly of diseases. Because of war metaphor, the professor said, we are more likely to fear cancer when, actually, most people survive the disease.

Mr Spencer then asked us about another area in which he feels metaphors cause trouble. He asked us to consider relationships. What metaphors do we use when we think of relationships? 'We value people' I shouted out. Yes, he said and wrote it on his little whiteboard. We invest in people, another person added. And soon enough we had listed a whole whiteboard of economic metaphor. Relationships could be bankrupt, we said. People are priceless, we said. All economic metaphor. I was taken aback.

And that's when it hit me like so much epiphany getting dislodged from my arteries. The problem with christian culture is that we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. Professor Spencer was right, and not only was he right but I felt as though he had cured me, as though he had let me out of my cage. I could see it very clearly. If someone is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us and, perhaps, we feel they are priceless. I could see it so clearly, and I could feel it in the pages of my life. This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. The church used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed those who did.'

Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller

And to add to that, why do we treat ourselves like money...

That is definitely not what I thought I'd end up writing...
Now I am super motivated to go tidy my desk, instead of doing homework...

Man I love that book so much...

If I haven't lent it to you yet, tell me that I should lend it to you for some of the summer holidays. I promise it will give a marvellous alternative to reading King Lear, Fly Away Peter, The Dolls House and The Odyssey.

Even if you don't enjoy it, you can throw it back in my face when I don't do what it says, cos I've read it three times and I plan to read it again. So If you catch me doing something that I shouldn't be, I should have gotten the point by now and you can tell me that if you like.

Wanna know something funny?
I was gonna turn this post into pointless rambling and end it with a ya mum joke.
Funny how life goes...

withyamum

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