I flew into Seattle this morning for a conference at Mars Hill Church. It’s my first time in Seattle, and as I sit in Top Pot Doughnuts, eating a well-balanced breakfast (all the major food groups: sugar, grease, and coffee) and checking my email before my meetings start, I immediately notice two things:
1) I’m the only one in the entire city not wearing black, charcoal, or dark brown. I’m fresh off the plane with my bright Quiksilver shirt, and everybody’s staring at me like I’m a big dork. If only they knew how right they were.
2) There’s a mom with a newborn baby sitting next to me who might as well be the virgin Mary for all the commotion she and her baby are causing. I’ve heard there are more dogs than kids in Seattle, and now I believe it: people are cooing over that kid like they’re living in the apocalyptic world of Children of Men and it’s the first baby they’ve seen in years. Who knows, maybe it really is… I haven’t seen anyone else under 20 all morning.
Now, I’m sure the citizens of Seattle are fine, upstanding folk, but I think this might point to a possible cultural quirk. Maybe people are more interested in their own ambitions and agendas than they are in passing those things down to another generation.
Let’s face it: kids are a pain. And it seems like people here have decided the inconvenience of child-rearing just isn’t worth whatever joy they might find through building into another person’s life.
And maybe this speaks to a growing unwillingness in our culture to invest in relationships that might hinder our own personal freedom.
Last week, Cyndi and I rented an intriguing movie called Into the Wild. It’s the true story of a guy who had just graduated from college and wanted to escape the obligations of society by hiking out into the wilderness of Alaska to live off the land by himself. Convincing himself that “You don’t need human relationships to be happy,” his only company was the wolves, the moose, and some classic books he had stuffed into his backpack.
I won’t ruin the ending, but the climax of the story comes at a point where he’s alone in the wilderness, sliding into a half-delirious state brought about by starvation and some poisonous root he tried to eat. With a weak, shaky hand, he scrawls in between the lines of one of his books, “Happiness only real when shared.”
As Genesis 2 makes clear, God created us to be in relationship, both with him and with other people. That’s what it means to be made in God’s image – we were created to mirror the perfect fellowship shared by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Why do we think fulfillment will come from pursuing our own illusive idea of freedom apart from those relationships?