FOR SOME REASON I CAN'T DO BOLD TYPE, SO CAPS WILL HAVE TO DO FOR NOW

Pretty boring day today. One of those days you'll soon forget, really. I call them "utility days," because all they really do is last to get you from one day to another. A grim, cynical way of looking at it, yeah, but it's the best I could come up with.

I'm house-sitting for my parents tonight, so all I did was really sit around their place and watch TV. I was excited because VH1 was doing "I Love the 90s" and I had missed it the rest of the week. I'm a nostalgia buff, I enjoyed the other shows of this kind, but this was the one I was looking forward to because the 90s were a decade I really dug. The news was more scandalous, the music was not as cheesy and the movies of the 90s were ten times better. . .Pulp Fiction is so much more of a classic than The Breakfast Club. So, I flipped it on at nine expecting two hours of nostalgia.

But, by 10:15, I was bored.

There were two reasons I think the show wasn't working for me. For one, nostalgia's only fun when it's about things you forgot that you have a good memory of. The 90s are so close that it's not fun. . . the things you tried to forget because they were annoying are. . . big surprise here. . . still annoying!! And the things that people really liked and had a big influence (the aforementioned Pulp Fiction and Friends) are things people still talk about, so nostalgia really isn't a big deal. Or maybe I was cranky. There were fun parts, but two hours was a lot.

More than that, though, it really shed some light on how sad our culture is. We are so obsessed with The Next Big Thing. And then that gets boring and we move onto The Other Next Big Thing. When the "Macarena" got boring and silly (which, I believe was verse two) we moved onto "The Train." When grunge was boring us, we turned to teen pop. It never crossed our minds that our fads weren't getting boring. . . it was just that we are never going to be satisfied with these trivial things.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not blasting nostalgia or pop culture. Like I said, these type of shows are guilty pleasures for me. And I have a subscription to Entertainment Weekly that feeds my fascination of pop culture. But there are people who take it too seriously. I know people whose entire lives hinge on pop culture comments and quirks, never stopping to think of anything deeper and getting bummed when the latest craze bottoms out. I actually had heard people complain that they would miss "Friends" because "they were like my real friends."

I'm glad I've chosen to keep pop culture on the sidelines of life as a harmless diversion, where it belongs. I'm glad my obsession is (trying to be) God and the pursuit of His glory. In 2000 years, that's never petered out or gotten old. Although Christianity has been victim to certain fads, the Truth of the Gospel itself will never lose its luster, truth, or power.

But I'm also glad that God isn't like us. His ways are not our ways. He is not taken in by fads. So his love for us isn't because He got tired of the angels and wanted to create The Next Big Thing. He isn't going to get tired, bored, or annoyed with us. He's going to love us in spite of our faults, stick with us even when we're tedious and frustrating, and love us with what some theologians have called "the furious love of God." Sounds schmaltzy, sappy and Disney-esque to some. And it's definitley not the "what's in it for me?" love of our culture or the call to live a life of fun and carelessness and riches that our world tells us to pursue.

Exactly. :)

C-Dubbs