seanmbrage

When families gather together for major holidays like Christmas or thanksgiving, it’s pretty typical to find the smallest children sitting at the “kids table”. This is, for the most part, a good thing. Kids are able to connect with others their own age, they aren’t providing too great a distraction from the adults trying to catch up and share a meal, and everything at that table is meant to engage them in their own context. Little plates, little portions, little children.

But there comes a point in the life of a child when they stop eating at the kids table and join the extended family to eat, drink, and partake at the big table. The common table.

They don’t leave the kids table for the 4th-5th grade table, then to the junior high table before the high school table. They don’t then head to the college table, young professionals table, young marrieds table, singles table, bitter emergents table, super-seeker table, or other table. And there’s a reason.

Families gather together for holidays to eat, drink, reflect, share, and partake in a meal together. Sometimes for the only time out of a year that they all can. So while we want the kids close and happy, we want them to join the full feasting table with us at some point.

Jesus calls us sons, brothers, and sisters. And he also says that we are Christians if we eat his flesh and drink his blood. In other words, Jesus calls us a family and then brings us together for a holiday meal. Only it’s a celebration that never ends, because he never stops being risen from the dead or alive or the absolute king of the universe.

That makes this the best family meal you could ever hope to partake of in your entire life.

Which is why having a kids table makes sense. You want your kids to be happy, to be together, to enjoy this meal in a context that makes sense to them and for them.

But you should really, really hope and want that one day your kids will leave the kids table and join you and the rest of the family in eating, drinking, and partaking in this glorious feast that is the church of Jesus.

You wouldn’t stand for a systematic separation between you, your children and your family in any other context of your life. Let’s stop imposing it as “normal, healthy Christian development,” and let’s stop teaching kids that isolation, separation, and marketing are the signs of Christ’s church.

Today’s tweets should have been a blog post. I’m sorry if you follow me and got sick of the tirade. Here’s the thought in its entirety.

It’s easy for me to demonstrate that I can be a cynical horse’s ass on the Internet, but I shouldn’t pretend it’s part of Christian service.
Christian art, including satire, should be focused on communicating and demonstrating truth and beauty, because Jesus is truth and beauty.
Christian satire, like Screwtape, should use farce to communicate Gospel beauty and truth, not “people who do or say X are idiots.”

The world uses satire to mock and to “scoff.” My rampant desire to be “funny” plays out mostly with me sitting in the seat of scoffers.
If I think that Jesus would be just as big a jerk as I am, then I’ve got way bigger issues than “what would make a funny tweet?”

Attributing snide, bitter, cynical “quotes” to Jesus is saying that he’s just as bitter and cynical as you, which is idolatry, not satire.

Thanks to the Verge for confirming my suspicions as to why Google Drive is a terrible idea.

“When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.”

Hannah and I watched the movie Drive on Friday night. This movie came out a while ago, so it’s not like anyone on the internet needs another in-depth review. So let me give you the bullets:

• This movie is excellent. Excellent, excellent.
• Before seeing it, I heard someone complain that it was both a boring film and a terrible action movie. I would agree with the latter statement, and maybe the former but only if the movie had been advertised to me as an action movie. Even then, I would have been beyond pleasantly surprised.
• Ryan Gosling is really badass.
• The elevator scene is the best juxtaposition of violent tension and out-of-the-park romance I’ve seen since the first attack sequence in The Village. Yes, I liked The Village. Go read a different blog.
• The soundtrack is wonderful. Absolutely genius work by the music department. Mostly original work from Cliff Martinez, there are also some brilliant synth bits from acts like Desire and College that make this a great soundtrack to own.

My non-bulleted thoughts:

Drive was more character study than anything else in my opinion, which is probably why I loved it so much. There is this gross tendency in all media right now (music, literature, film, TV) to try and create sweeping epics every time something is created. Every book world has to be Hogwarts, every serious TV show has to out back-story LOST, and the Hunger Games, Twilight Saga, and recent Marvel film adaptations speak for themselves. I don’t even want to talk about every crappy “rock” band is out trying to release their own “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Sgt. Peppers”. My point is, everyone is (falsely) under the impression that the only way to tell a story is to tell a really, really big story. A story with a broad universe full of countless warring factions, characters with hundred-year backstories waiting to be uncovered in prequels, villains with motives unknown until book 7.

Drive doesn’t do any of this. Drive gives us wonderful, rich characters. And it gives us next to nothing to go on about these people, except for how they respond to circumstance inside of a 2-hour span. There is no elongated origin tale for Driver. No epilogue for Irene. No “satisfying” sequence of every last aspect of the gangster’s crime network falling apart as the credits roll.

Driver doesn’t even get a name. He drives.

Irene? She loves.

Bryan Cranston’s garage owner? He fixes cars, and doesn’t stay out of trouble. We don’t find out what it was about his mother’s drinking or his father’s leaving that makes him fix cars or get into trouble. We don’t even know if he had a mother or a father. These characters simply exist. We don’t know if they existed for years before the movie started, and we can at best imagine what will happen when the movie is over.

Drive is not an epic, sweeping tale. It’s just a story about a driver who drives, and some things that happen to him.

It’s one of the best stories I’ve seen in years.

Watch Drive (iTunes Movie Link)

Drive

Today is known to hipster kids in America as “a day without shoes.” This was started by the company TOMs (who will not be linked to from this blog) as a way of “raising awareness” about the “global tragedy” that some people in some countries don’t have shoes. TOMs seeks to remedy this by dumping millions of shoes on people who aren’t asking for them, thereby destroying local businesses, stunting economic growth and independence, and making sure that the 3rd-world remains dependent on the 1st for as long as you both shall live.

In other words, I hate this day. It is everything that is wrong with high-horsing, welfare-loving western culture. We believe that by not eating meat, an animal lives; by not wearing shoes, the world is changed. I think TOMs business model is despicable, and today is a travesty.

My friend JD wrote here about “symbolic change.” That is what “a day without shoes” is. Feeling like I’ve done a good thing is the same as doing a good thing. But it isn’t.

A Day Without Dignity has a sharp, poignant look at the reality of American aid-dumping in the 3rd world. You should check it out. And put some shoes on for crying out loud.