Flying Upside Down

A whole generation of girls believes the greatest men of our day, are a 90 year old vampire, who looks nineteen and a teenage werewolf. Girls (and not just girls) swoon at the thought of knowing men like them. They have no repulsion toward the bloodletting that one of the characters indulges in, nor do they recoil at the idea of a wolf sleeping with a woman. Their hearts throb in anticipation as a vampire sneaks into the room of a girl their own age every night without anyone knowing, and they don’t even seem a little bothered by the werewolves “imprinting” on little girls.

Our world seems to be flying upside down, as Dallas Willard pointed out in his book The Divine Conspiracy. And the sad thing is that the culture doesn’t even care, because there is not right side up. There is an emptiness, and a searching among us. Yet we are looking and searching in the dark, finding the darkest things to cling onto for survival, longing for some supernatural being to save us from our mundane existence and add excitement to our lives. Thing is, that Supernatural Being died and rose again 2000 years ago to save us, yet we ignore Him in favor of the "undead".

Funny, we are even willing to embrace someone else’s vision to gain our own hope of salvation. That is right, Stephanie Meyer had a dream about a vampire that led her to write the Twilight series, and through that dream came T-shirts, and discussion groups, and pilgrimages to the small town of Forks in Washington State.

At least in the pages of the Twilight books, there is the hope of some sort of redemption. One that is seriously misguided, with eternal damnation as the end result, if by some strange happening death might actually take a vampire’s “life”, but still it is there.

Sadly, I have discovered that there is a part of the world that does not even have a false savior to give them hope. Part of the world is living in such utter darkness that they don’t even believe that there is a way out of the bleakness of human existence. They visit a place called Where the Wild Things Are, and discover there is no redeemer, there is no better tomorrow, there is only pain and sorrow.

If you are not familiar with Where the Wild Things Are, it is a very short children’s book, about a boy who visits an island inhabited by fantastic creatures called the “Wild Things”. That said the short children’s book has recently been transformed into a motion picture, in which a boy filled with anger and rage flees to the Wild Things, and discovers that they are just as angry and destructive as the place of pain that fills his own heart. He promises them that he will be their king and save them from sadness and pain with his invisible shield, but in the end, they discover that he is a fraud and all their hope for happiness is dashed when he fails to save them from themselves. The boy returns home to his own mother, his own family, with the simple words spoke to or by one of the unhappy Wild Things, “It’s hard to be a family.”

There is no redemption just the reality of the joyless, hopelessness of life to endure until death. That, in the end, is the takeaway the movie leaves the audience. I left the theater utterly depressed, thankful that the sun was out in all of its Arizona glory, and that the Son of God reigns in all of His.

I have always told my children that no matter what story, what movie, what book, or play, that I can find Jesus in it in some aspect or another. But I told them that I was wrong. There was NO redeemer in Where the Wild Things Are. When the Son is absent, then too is His light and all that is left is darkness.

When a vampire is the hero of the young, and a movie for kids is filled with so much “realism” that they leave the theaters in quiet contemplation, we know we are flying upside down, about to take a nosedive into the earth.

The postmodern age looks to darkness for redemption and when it does not find it there, it falls into despair.

The Light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognize Him. He came to that which was His own, but His own did not receive Him.

Even within the walls and halls of our own churches, a generation is looking to darkness to redeem them. Will we be like the generation Jesus first came to, the one who crucified Him, who were His own, but did not recognize Him because He came as Light.

In Him was LIFE and that LIFE was the LIGHT of MEN!

JOHN 1