I know this is more than you need to know, but oftentimes on the weekends I like to fall asleep in the basement on the couch. Lisa can't understand it but it is kind of serene for me, watching a little tube before calling it a night. Anyway, a few weeks ago it was around 11pm when I was readying myself for a nice snooze when one last flip through the channels brought me to two Leonard DiCaprio movies, "Gangs of New York," an old favorite of mine, and one of his I had never seen and never intended to, "The Beach." Now, I had seen the case of "The Beach" in the movie store for years and took it to be some romantic story of DiCaprio and some girl on some beach somewhere living out some utopic fantasy. BORING!

And of course if you have seen it you know that there is some of that, but I really got hooked on the story and couldn't stop watching it, trying to sleep at times to no avail. First, a quote in the opening part really struck me:

The only downer is, everyone's got the same idea. We all travel thousands of miles just to watch TV and check in to somewhere with all the comforts of home, and you gotta ask yourself, what is the point of that?

How true is that? The past three summers I've gone to Kenya and done the same thing for my teams, tried to provide for them the same amenities we find here in the States rather than trying to provide for them the experience of the country. Not anymore, that is going to be in the first trip meeting this year, that very quote and maybe even the clip from the movie to let people know that they are going to Kenya for a reason and not to make it seem like America.

Second, the story with the people on the island really got me, especially Sal. You could tell right away that there was something wrong with her and it really manifest itself throughout the movie. For her it wasn't just about having a good time on some hidden island, this island had overcome her to the point where it almost possessed her (tangent - this morning I sat down with a friend who just became pastor of a dying church to bring it back to life and one of the church members said that they need to have a Christmas program because they have one every year even though there are only about five kids in the church and they need to play Silent Night as the last song, a few years ago the old pastor played Joy to the World, he didn't last long, do you see the similarities?) to the point where she was willing to kill Richard (DeCaprio) to stay on the island, but it all backfired on her. If you haven't seen the movie, I recommend it.

Again, what I think hooked me here was the connection to our culture. We can't just enjoy things as they are, we have to organize them, make them perfect, allow them to overcome us, rule us. Like Sal, she couldn't just enjoy the beach, the freedom, the alternate experience this allowed them, she had to organize it, rule it, oversee it to a fault. In the church, we can't just gather as believers, teach, fellowship, serve, everything has to be organized and perfect or else the masses go somewhere else. Who cares? Settle down! Chill out! We mess up our priorities and get all out of whack - over non-essentials. We need to reinforce and focus on the essentials more (deity of Christ, His death as atonement for our sins, Bible as Word of God, etc) and less on the non-essentials (whether we have a Christmas program and the last song is Joy to the World - you think I'm kidding here, I'm not) or else we are going to continue to slide into relativity. I'm sick of it!