carbonated joy

I was driving to work this morning. I was near our friendly neighborhood nuclear power plant (seriously) and something caught my eye: a nervous little squirrel. He was trying to get from one side of the road to the other. (So…why did the squirrel cross the road?) He looked frightened, totally emaciated and a little mangy. Nuclear squirrel frantically dodged in front of me and I swerved to barely miss him. It was like a spastic squirrel version of the old arcade game Frogger. He was desperately trying to cross the busy street. I watched, in my rear view mirror, as he made a final sprint for freedom when, SUDDENLY, his little squirrel dreams were crushed by the fast-moving blue Minivan right behind me . Yes, sadly, the poor little guy didn’t quite make it. He became just another roadkill statistic. Let’s take a moment of silence to remember this ill-fated, little squirrel….

Ahem, okay.

In contrast to this sad squirrelly story, recently I was driving past a lovely little man made pond. I saw brake lights and noticed that several cars were stopped in front of me. I was ticked because I really didn’t have time for this, and why were we stopping anyway!?
I finally got close enough to see what the holdup was, there was a family of carefree ducks crossing the street. It seemed as if they were moving in slow motion. Then one of the ducks stopped and started cleaning herself right there in the middle of the road. We sat there for five minutes. We were all honking and yelling at the duck. One guy even got out of his car and tried to shoo the duck out of the way. But she ignored us all, and finally, when she was ready, she moved to the other side of the road with her family.
Now, I’m thinking about the squirrel and the duck and the difference between the two. The big difference was a big sign next to the pond. It was a reflective, yellow, triangular sign with the silhouettes of a mama duck and two baby ducks. This was a designated duck crossing. A way had been made for the ducks to safely cross the road—and they knew it. They were protected by an outside source. They could take their time, and nobody could touch them.
But there was no sign or squirrel crossing for my little furry friend. He was totally on his own—and he knew it. He had no protection and therefore no future.
I realized that many times in my life I’ve felt like the spastic little squirrel. Life can move pretty fast and I can frantically run from one situation or problem to the next. I move as fast as I can hoping that I don’t become roadkill. But it doesn’t have to be like that. As a friend of God, I’m promised protection from an outside source. I know God has made a way for me. I can be confident and trust Him. No matter what danger is zooming around me, I can know he’s made it possible for me to cross over to the other side. The times I feel boxed in, when it seems like there’s no way out, I just need to act like a duck instead of a squirrel. I can move in the knowledge that God has prepared a way for me to make it. I can just slow down and enjoy the scenery as I cross the street.

(Cue the Sarah McLachlan music)
Everyday in America MOTS affects unsuspecting American people. MOTS is a silent killer of enthusiasm and dreams, MOTS causes atrophy of the imagination. MOTS is More Of The Same. It is the insanity of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
It is sparked by the paralyzing ADITW virus (Always Done It That Way).
The symptoms of MOTS are a marked absence of passion, creativity and risk taking. It can cause breakouts of irrelevance and complete boredom.
The cure is a joyful rebellion against the status quo. You have to refuse to rinse and repeat, instead rinse and revolutionize.
Refuse to play the game of same.
Take a stand, shout it loud enough to wake those who snore…
“I’m living wild and unpredictable and I want MORE!”…Just not more of the same.
Join the fight against MOTS!
Do different daily.
Try. Risk. Jump. Dance. Fail. Giggle. Instigate. Incite. Create. Think.
Join the joyful rebellion!
We must stop MOTS in our lifetime. C’mon! Do it for the children.

I’m a proud alumni of Schoolhouse Rock
I’m not sure how impressive that would be on my resume, but it’s true.
Music and pictures taught me much more than lectures and standardized tests. There’s a lesson there!
Why do I treasure my time at the School of Schoolhouse Rock?
Why, its elementary, my dear. I learned the function of a conjunction. I celebrated the great American melting pot. I discovered that three is truly a magic number and zero is a hero! I was told to unpack my adjectives and that was great, important and magnificent. I still can tell you how a lowly bill can become a law. THAT is electricity, electricity!! I was off to great places with Interplanet Janet. I learned that learning can be fun! I discovered discovery and it had a beat that you can dance to!
I’m pretty sure that I got a Masters from the School of Schoolhouse Rock, It’s been forty years and I can STILL sing along with all the songs.
So, I THINK I will put that on my resume,
with Schoolhouse Rock, how wonderful you are.

Those crazy millennials!
With their skinny jeans and man buns and coffee shops and questionable work ethic…
I hear millennials get blamed for a lot.
They seem to be the cause for the mess we find ourselves in.
It’s not US, must be THEM, right?
We group a generation together and paint them all with the same accusatory brush. It’s gotta stop! Accusing the young is getting old.
You would think that we would have recognized by now that stereotypes stifle spirit.
We need to quit treating people like they are inherently worse than us because they were born after us.
EVERY age is golden in it’s own way AND EVERY age is tarnished in it’s own way.
EVERY generation, since the beginning of time, has BOTH stepped up AND screwed up. It’s a tasty combo platter of our DNA and the consequences of our choices.
But there is hope for all of us, we are ALL equal parts of beautiful AND broken.
It’s about family instead of generation.
We ALL have both nothing AND everything to offer.
Let’s learn from each other during our shared journey.

Out of the deep woods of our everyday life, it lumbers…Sas-squash!
We are camping out in our routine and then SUDDENLY we hear…CRACK…a branch breaks underfoot of the Bigfoot. We see the shadowy figure and we know nothing will ever be the same.
It’s Sas-squash!!
There can be times when we all have that presence lurking in our life. We wish that it was a hoax, but sadly it’s a big hairy reality. It could be foe or family. Maybe, it’s that person looking over your shoulder waiting to catch you messing up. It’s the one rubbing your past in your face. It’s the one who takes the credit or who pulls out the rug. It’s the one building their self esteem at the expense of yours.
It’s the squasher of hopes and dreams…
it’s Sas-squash.
Sometimes folklore sadly becomes real life, in our cubicles and classrooms, our living rooms and office meetings.
Sas-squashes crush our dreams and hopes. They squash our enthusiasm. They squash the momentum right out of the moment. They suck the air out of the room. Their goal seems to be to leave us flat. They repeatedly sucker punch our souls. They load unbearable amounts of stress upon us.
It’s frightening, We feel their big hairy feet on our neck, holding us down, holding us back.
What can we do? How can we be bigger than Bigfoot? How can we be stronger than the squash?
We REMIND ourselves who we are. Don’t let others press you into a mold. Be yourself, use your unique gifts, sing your song, fly your flag.
We need to REMIND ourselves that we are loved by the people closest to us, AND by the all powerful ONE who made us.
We allow those remembrances to solidify like cement on the inside of us. What is inside becomes stronger than the external forces. We respond with love, we respond with forgiveness. We trust in the ONE who makes strong.
We use these things like flashlights in the dark woods.
Light exposes the lurkers.
It might take a while, but light wins.
The light of truth.
The light of love.
It sends Sas-squash running.
He awkwardly runs away on his big hairy feet.
Light wins.

I’m not a big fan of the high top table.
That’s a little vague…
Let me make this clear, I HATE HIGH TOP TABLES!
It’s not because I have a hostility towards furniture.
It’s because I have legs that are barely 20 inches long. I’m not built for high top chairs. My low riding butt comes no where near the seat. Every time I try to sit in one I come close to bursting my spleen. It takes a lot of really embarrassing, completely public effort for this little freak to sit at a high top table. I once tried to get a running start and almost broke my tooth. I’ve tried to climb up the chair, which would have  been easier if I was actually coordinated at all. I’ve dived in and ended up beached on my belly like a short legged penguin. It gets weird.
A while back I was in a meeting where everyone was sitting at a high top table, after 3 or 4 ugly and unsuccessful attempts to hoist myself onto the chair, I gave up and awkwardly stood at the table. My coworkers were laughing too hard to offer to pick me up like a baby and put me on the chair. I would have let them do it, it might have taken 2 or 3 of them, but I was already feeling pretty embarrassed at that point.
Sometimes you get the feeling there’s not a place at the table for you, that is what high tops symbolize to me. They smell like exclusion. And that is sad, because I AM a big fan of tables. Tables are an incredibly important piece of furniture. Tables create space for supper, story and stillness. It’s a place meant to break bread and break barriers.

I think that sometimes we turn faith into a high-top table. We tell people there is a place at the table for them, but then we make it out of their reach. In the Bible, the Pharisees were the keepers of the hi-tops. They were the religious leaders who made the table unattainable for the undesirables. They heap rules and expectations and appropriateness upon people. The Pharisees were the people who were self-appointed to speak FOR God, without ever speaking OF God, there is a big difference.
In contrast, When I think about the story of Jesus, I see him at a lot of tables, but I don’t think they were hi-tops.
He invited a lot of lowlifes to the table. Lowlifes can rarely reach the high top.
One time, He did knock over some tables in the temple. He didn’t hate the furniture, I think he did it because people were using the tables to take advantage of the poor and excluding the powerless…basically the lowlifes. It seems that Jesus has a problem when there isn’t a place for everyone at the table, so he overturned the tables, I like to think they were high-tops.
At one table, what we call the last supper, Jesus was reclining with his friends…RECLINING!! In order to sit at this table, They were required to recline. It was about “how low can you go?”, the table wasn’t out of reach for anyone. Apparently, for Jesus, tables were an excuse to say “c’mon! Take your seat, take a load off, recline, rest…I’ve got this”.
That’s REALLY good news!
Jesus invites us to sit and enjoy supper, story and stillness.
Jesus hangs out with lowlifes like me, you can’t do that at high-top tables.
There’s a place for me, there’s a place for you, there’s a place for that person that bugs us.
Take a seat.

We learn them early in life, the rules of uniformity.
It’s pretty simple, if you want to be a part of US,
You need to dress-act-think like the rest of US.
The secret to acceptance and approval lies in conformity.
We are told to shut up and conform. Don’t be different; don’t make waves. Dress like everybody else. Think like everybody else. Act like everybody else. If you want to fit in, you have to blend in. Get in line.
It’s all so very uniform.
Life can begin to seem like one big dress code. Believe it or not, I’ve never been a big fan of dress codes. They confine and define. They deny admission and belonging. We think that it’s just about peer pressure, something we will outgrow or escape as we become fully bonded adult humans. But we never seem to outgrow the call to conformity. Go to most offices or churches, and you’ll find people all dressed alike—not because they want to, but because it’s the norm. People try to make us like them, we try to make people like us.
Act like me…think like me…dress like me…
I hate dress codes, I hate dress clothes. They never fit me right, especially dress pants. They make me itchy and uncomfortable. Nothing ever looks right, either. Everything I wear looks baggy because I have a baggy body.
One day I realized I didn’t want to conform. I saw conformity as a vicious social cycle that never lets up. It’s like a really crowded, out-of-control merry-go round. You frantically try to look and act like everyone else and you forget who you really are. The unchanging fact is that fashion constantly changes, so you’re constantly forced to redefine yourself. I hear people say they boldly and bravely dress a certain way because they want to express themselves, yet they express themselves by looking, acting, and thinking like everyone else. That is a little messed up.
I didn’t want to be like everybody else—that’s boring. I wanted to be me. Even now I still dress like I did when I was 12. I wear wrinkled T-shirts (preferably with a picture of a superhero or one of my favorite sports teams), baggy shorts, and Chuck Taylors.
The problem is that somewhere along the line, we start to believe being different is somehow bad. We think the key to survival and acceptance is conformity. We should all work hard to look, act, and think the same. We make SAME the goal. We desperately try to be SAME. We spend our lives in the sea of SAME, thinking that will make us happy, accepted and well adjusted humans.
But, my friends, the liberating truth is…
DIFFERENT IS GOOD.
DIFFERENT IS DESIGN.
Different is proof we have a Creator who has a wild imagination and a great sense of humor.
Be yourself.
Be different.
Be weird.
Be original.
Be willing to be misunderstood.
Don’t let anyone press you into some stupid mold. Maybe you look or dress different than anyone else. Maybe you act or think a little different than other people OR maybe you don’t.
Just be you, the completely original, never to be duplicated YOU!
Here’s an actual factual that hopefully sets you at ease: God doesn’t want you to be anything or anybody that you aren’t.
Just be yourself for God.
Be yourself for himself.
When we decide to live for him, God doesn’t change our passions or personality. He changes our purpose and our priorities. He knows you. He designed you, even all the weirdness. So be who God made you to be.
Own your weirdness.
Conformity is putting unnatural stress on yourself.
Conformity is a cage with an open door.
You don’t have to work at different, it’s a liberating thing to just be yourself. It gives you wings.
We were all designed to be different. A soup or stew with only one ingredient would be pretty bland. The variety of ingredients is what makes things tasty. There is a flavor that only you can bring to this bland world. We need your flavor. Be yourself, for therein lies the magic and the miracle. As you encounter and eventually embrace who you were born to be, miraculous things take place. You’re set free from the chains of conformity.
Conformity is the natural enemy of creativity.
I refuse to conform because I’m a piece of art. I’m a priceless, one-of-a-kind masterpiece—and so are you.
You might not feel like a masterpiece, but you are. You might feel your life is anything but art right now. That’s only because you’re too close to yourself.
In our city there is an amazing art gallery. It’s an incredible place that inspires the snot out of me (not literally…that would be gross). I just sit at a distance and stare at some of the amazing paintings.
Now imagine YOU are at an art museum, you are walking around, soaking it all in, and then you walk right up to a framed painting. You get so close to the painting your nose is touching it. It’s a beautiful painting of a nature scene complete with thick green grass, a babbling waterfall, and big oak trees with a chubby brown squirrel sitting on a branch. But you can’t appreciate the painting because you’re too close. All you can see is a green blur, a skinny blue mark, and a brown spot. It makes no sense because your perspective is all messed up. But if you step back a few feet, everything starts to take shape, and you can see the waterfall and the tree and even the cute little squirrel.
Life can be the same. You don’t realize that you’re too close to see the whole picture clearly. As you get older and get a little more perspective, things will start shaping up.
You ALSO need to remember that not only are you a masterpiece, but EVERYbody else is ALSO a masterpiece. EVERYONE on this planet is art, whether they act like it or not. The placement or use of a masterpiece doesn’t make it art, the touch of the artist creates art. You need to treat EVERYone you meet like art. We need to give others the space and the grace to be themselves. That means we don’t put down or disrespect the art in others. Imagine once again you’re back at the art gallery, and there’s a big opening. An amazing artist is there showing off some of his favorite work. You walk in and walk up to a piece, clear your throat, and spit on his painting (shocking!!). How do you think the artist would feel? Hurt? Angry? Disrespected? If you disrespect the creation, you’re disrespecting the creator.
When we disrespect people, the walking, talking art around us, we’re disrespecting the Creator, the artist who crafted them. I think God takes that personally. Respect the art, respect the Artist. Allow others to be themselves.

Conformity really is a crime against the Creator.

To be anything other than yourself is to deny the divine. God has unleashed amazing creative diversity and wild beauty in you. For us to try to contain the creativity just isn’t right.