Pinstripes and Paisley?

So at this point you might be thinking what up with the url?  Well, I guess this would be a good enough inquiry on which to launch this blog. 

I am a 37 year old guy with a wife and two great step children and for the most part I feel like we are just a normal kinda family. Now you may be asking yourself - what the heck is normal nowadays?  Here is my definition of normal  -  we are a family struggling with life.  We do our best to love and respect each other but sometimes miss that mark.  We never have enough - time, money, energy, quiet, adventure - whatever.  So in this culture where everything is so relative, I offer a definition of normal that you might be able to relate to (which oddly enough - IS the definition of normal). 

I stopped defining "our lot in life" or "our genre in which we live"  by our circumstances just recently and started to define it by our responses to those circumstances.  That has created a sense of unity with my past heritage, not only as a person - but as a Christian as well. 

You see, our circumstances will always be changing - but our emotion, physical, spiritual responses to those things don't often change at all.  As a matter of fact they haven't changed since the beginning of time.  We operate out of brokeness and that is the platform on which we stand and expose our worldviews. Adam and eve did, Judas did, Josephus did, Martin Luther did,  Christopher Columbus did,  Elvis did, Nixon did, and you do to. 

We, as people, are responding "to our surroundings" the same way in the year 2010 that our grandparents responded to theirs 100 years ago.  We just somehow think that we don't - that we couldn't, that the world is different now.  After all, we wear different clothes and words like connectivity mean something to us in everyday life now that they would never understand. 

We have smartphones and ipods.

Words like counterculture and postmodern are universally understood.

We are smarter, faster, better looking, cooler, more relevant, and will change the world forever.

We are green, they consumed, we create, they destroyed - we are different.

Right?

But .......Ask your grandparents if they ever "felt" that way.  Ask them if any of those concepts might sound familiar.  You might be surprised.  When they were 24 years old - they were saying and doing the same things we did and you might be doing.  Of course it was relative to the time they lived in - but the "response" to their surroundings was the same as yours and mine.  Maybe we are not "generationally" different at all.  Maybe that is a myth designed to separate people.

We are not dealing with anything new.  It has all happened before.  I promise.

Now maybe the days of pinstripes and paisley in church are gone - but maybe not.  Think about it.  What if none of that actually mattered at all..........