more food for thought.

An article from Relevant came out today about our generation's epidemic of identity crises. Here's a bit from it that rang true for me personally, and here's the link:

I once considered myself an idealist. I have come to realize that my license for optimism has since expired. The more seasoned I become, the more I understand the realist I have ripened into. I have been weathered down by this world. I am jaded, as you are jaded. I am not who I say I am, just as you are not. I am a liar, a beggar, a thief, a fake, just as you are. An idealist might say that it is better for us to all be weathered pieces that have now formed to fit the abstruse shape of the next. As a realist, I will tell you that the Maker has cultivated far too much beauty in each individual heart for us to toss aside to blend in.

Another Relevant writer posits the following adaptation of the words of Allen Ginsberb in a piece hilighting the self-destruction that inevitably comes from following Hollywood's example for "cultural living",

The best minds of my generation. Destroyed by madness. Madness we have created in our cultural insistence on (groupthink) individualism and (false) freedom.

How blessed am I that my identity & worth is found in the creator of the heavens and the earth?

Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn't love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.

You can be sure that using people or religion or things just for what you can get out of them—the usual variations on idolatry—will get you nowhere, and certainly nowhere near the kingdom of Christ, the kingdom of God. Ephesians 5:1-2, 5 [The Message]