Fake

I spent yesterday up in the Poconos with my mother and my grandparents. During the afternoon I retreated to one of the bedrooms to take a nap becuase my mother woke me up early and all of this rainy weather is sucking the life out of me. So I was laying down and watching cable and I stumbled upon some first class horrible religious programming. The preacher looked like a pimp and was babbling along about nothing.

It used to be amusing. My friends and i would do impressions in sugary southern accents, fake altar call, we would hit it other on the head, fall backwards, tremble, and then roll around laughing like the idiot we were. Landover Baptist could have taken notes from our bizarre performances.

However on this dreary afternoon as I watched this little program there was no humor to be found, it just made me sad.

What was the message behind the performance? Was it really at its core just theatre masquerading as something more?

I rememeber last spring my friend won two tickets to a Hillsong United concert and since his boyfriend couldn't go he invited me. It was free, so i said yes. Everybody else in the crowd was totally into it like dancing and crying and jumping up and down and i tried to do that for a while but i felt stupid and my arm started hurting and i realized it - this band did this every night. This was a show, a performance, an act. this was fake.

I have been called cynical by numerous persons and a person was once so kind as to suggest that the emptiness i sometimes see in life is really a reflection of the emptiness in me ( i know with friends like these...)

But seriously, why the drama? I'm scared sometimes that we wrap what we have to say, i mean, we call it 'the good news', do we really think that? Do we intentionally repackage what we really mean to make people happy, becuase we know that we would rather them just listen to the friendly things that we have to say than be truly challenged or for that matter inspired to get up and do something?

Its like, when my brother was little, she would put his cough medicine with his pepsi so he would drink it. (for me, she had to put it in a shot glass. i thought i was soooo cool. beyond the point though.)

Why can't we just tell it like it is and whoever wants to listen listens? Why can't we down the medicine straight up? Why do we have to pretend to be better than we are? Is life really a performance?