Hippies with Hygiene

For those of you who don’t know me real well I have a confession to make. Some of my long time friends know this about me, but in the interest of transparency, here’s a juicy tidbit: My favorite show on TV is South Park. Can you still respect me? If you think I am a terrible person, let me know and I will explain to you my thoughts on why it is OK for me to watch this show. Not that any of my normal readers would think this, because they all have a perfect understanding of our freedom in Christ.

I bring the show up because I think this weeks episode has an interesting parallel for us to draw as Christians. The premise of the show was that hippies started to move to South Park. At first the people did not care, but eventually the hippies started to destroy the way of life for the people of south park. They had a giant Woodstock-like festival and soon enough the entire town smelled like weed. Some of the boys were drawn in by the hippie ideas, and decided to take up their cause. They went along with the festival as a plan to draw people together, in hopes that when they had enough people they would unite and defeat the things that hippies are against. To their dismay, all the hippies wanted to do was talk about their ideas, and have a festival. There was no real action behind it. There was no bite to the bark.

This brings to mind the story of Jesus calling his disciples. He is at a body of water and asks some guys who were washing their nets, to get their stuff dirty again and try fishing one more time. They hadn’t caught anything all night, but they gave it a shot anyway, and wound up catching more than they could handle. This story depicts the kind of Christian that I no longer want to be. For so much of my life I have been a net washing Christian. It is important to do that, because if I don’t wash my net it will rot and deteriorate after a while. But I have little to wash off of my net because so rarely do I use it. Like the hippies in the episode of South Park I talk the talk but rarely walk the walk.

It comes down to an issue of trust. I know that will not leave me hanging. If I get out there and use my net, I will bring in fish. Probably more than I could handle. But that requires me to throw them out there. That’s risky. I need to take the Lord at his word and trust him anyway though. I am tired of talking, I want to be what I talk about. I may be taking this old adage out of context, but I think the point can be made - There are plenty of fish in the sea.