You're good at what you do. You study and listen and read - honing your trade - only to understandably and occasionally forget that behind the progress toward success are real neighbors consuming your work.
So you must ask - and keep asking - not the myopic, "How can I get customers to fall in love with my product?" but a more generous, "How can I love by getting this product to my customers?"
In March, I began hosting a series at TheHighCalling.org called Everything Matters. The premise is somewhat simple: What you do during your day is a cultural act, and it will either create, manage, or consume the world God has given to you. (Consume here has no negative connotations—rather, think consuming art or consuming broccoli.) Whether I'm digging out a new flower bed, balancing my checkbook, or, as I said, eating broccoli, I'm participating in the world as a cultural being, one who is called to create, manage, and consume the goods that surround us.
The most recent series entry was written by Kevin Schut, a professor of media + communication at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC, Canada. Kevin tells people he plays video games for a living, and it’s partly true. His book Of Games and God: A Christian Exploration of Video Games will be released by Brazos Press in early 2013.
Here is an excerpt of the article. I hope you'll join the conversation.
My new iPad contains several dozen worlds. There’s a boy’s bed where little wind-up robots protect him from scary dinosaurs. There’s the Caribbean, where I get to sail, hoist the Jolly Roger, and relieve Spanish merchants of their sugar. There’s a fantasy kingdom under siege
from hostile orcs and skeletons. And, of course, there are rooms of
boxes, glass, and stones erected by pigs desperate to stave off assaults
from irate avians.
While it is amazing that one digital device can be a doorway to so many imaginary places, not everyone is excited about this... (Read more here.)
I haven't watched TV since the Super Bowl and the result is that I'm low on blog content. I do have a sizable stack of ads and related quotes, articles, links, notes scribbled on Subway napkins and squares of toilet paper—a travelogue of potential material. But fasting through Lent did what it usually does to my advertising sensitivity: it put the critic to sleep.
Months away from TV and I forget what used to be on and who sponsored it. I go to bed earlier, realizing that Leno and company lack real stimulation power. I miss the 30-second appetizer bites and celebrity influence. I read more, like pieces from Fiction 100, a short story anthology; and from Deuteronomy 31 where the decision between light and dark, life and death, seem so obviously easy yet so surprisingly hard.
I'm out of content because I've been taking a new mental path to work. I'm not still simmering on last night's musings; on the death-knell of simple living, or the faux-invigoration of card-swiping for things I couldn't possibly need (but really do want).
This isn't to say I've been entirely unplugged, just filtered. I caught a handful of movies since February. Hugo was cleverly done, the French-made Microcosm captivated us with its ants drinking water, and both Art & Copy and Objectified—two documentaries up my alley—kept my ad-mind more on standby than a full snooze. Still, a month of blogging inactivity?
Fasting from too much TV inside also coincided this year with an abundance of growth outside. Our late winter and early spring were exceptionally warm, feeling more like late spring and early summer. I've exercised more, mowed more, walked the kids to school more, pulled weeds more. All good, like a thorough cleaning.
Clutter in general has a way of forcing me to tolerate limited space. If your desk is busy, like mine often is, you know exactly what I mean. You haven't got an entire desk, just something the size of a legal pad. The rest is for clutter. Lent, in a way, wipes it all clean. It helps me see what's there, what isn't, what could be that usually can't be. I'll go back, of course. Back to the mental confines. I do every year once the weather changes. By mid-fall, I'll be looking forward to this or that sit-com, and sitting around on Sunday afternoons watching football.
And that's when I'll get more material.
Just in time for Christmas deals and my own reawakening of consumer lust, I'll get more material because it will be material for me; for my own struggle to tread what feels like shoreless water, a commercial-made sea of desire and want. I'll want to drown in it like the humans in WALL-E, who lounge in chairs with, as one reviewer described, a "constant feed of TV and video chatting. They drink all of their meals through a straw out of laziness and/or bone loss...."
That material, the hyper-critical kind I'm prone to invoke, often comes from me trying to push the straw away. In those soap box moments I'm treading desperately to avoid being one of those people; I'm playing the preacher who rails against pornography only to be discovered as the audience to his own sermons. We fight against what we know best, right?
This is the root of criticism. It is my own struggle to keep from drowning in pleasures that pull me beneath the surface. For now, I'm enjoying dry ground. But I'll go back. It's inevitable, this draw toward heaven when hell offers the easiest substitutions.
I'll be hosting a series about culture on Fridays through April and May at TheHighCalling.org. It's called "Everything Matters," which is a phrase I borrowed from the CCO's Jubilee Conference. The conversation started with me looking for some guidance, and it would be an understatement to say that I knew exactly how to proceed. There is simply too much to know.
Culture is so very complex and my insight, so limited. The following commercial for The Guardian reminds me of these facts in a brilliant choreography of images and words, based on the Three Little Pigs:
As soon as I--or The Guardian for that matter--believe I have the angle on something, new evidence is introduced. New factors come into play. So it isn't the first reporter who has the story right. She's just first. Additional voices add depth and uncover misreads and challenge running opinions. Sometimes the whole truth eventually makes it into the light, though usually it doesn't; it just gets more complex.
Culture is like this. Evasive, perplexing. Yet I don't always have the choice to stand by waiting for it to unshake into knowable pieces, which means that sometimes I have to step in when it's still unclear. Sometimes, not always. Wisdom comes from spending time in the thick of it, but wisdom also--maybe more so--comes from stepping back and seeking counsel.
Read the kick-off article, Creating a High Calling Culture, and then tune in over the coming weeks as practitioners share how they see and interact with culture according to specific disciplines. They won't parse the latest headline happening; we're employing a less myopic view here. But in doing so, they'll teach us to see better. They'll give us a way of looking at the world that can help make sense of the complexity. And practically, they'll call us to create, manage, and consume culture in a way that reflects God's own creating, managing, and consuming. I hope you'll join us.
Dave fixes my car. Dave also coaches Little League. Both are work,
and both are cultural acts, even though only fixing my car earns Dave a
paycheck. We are, as Andy Crouch says, “culture makers.” Some make
improvements to cars for pay, yes, but we also make toys, music, houses,
apps, children, communities, stories, language, history, libraries,
justice, noise, and play.
Culture is all day, every day. Fascinating, isn’t it?
