Youth Subculture...

Are we doing things just because they feel cool. I mean, 20 years ago, the word "cool" wasn't even said normally. It was just getting cool to say cool. Society has changed over the ages, and drastically, but how are we to live in a way that honors God in the midst of a different culture with different values... Are we acting in certain ways just because society has evolved in that way? Is our open-mindedness just because the world tells us to be open-minded? Is all our youth and vigor in vain?

"Even the youths shall faint and be weary,
And the young men shall utterly fall,
But those who wait on the Lord
Shall renew their strength;
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint."
-Isaiah 40:30-31

This verse means to me that we in our youth, with all our hopeful emotions will still come to points in our life where we must come face to face with reality and embrace it (that's when we faint and get weary) :-). From my life, I have come out of a place where I had utterly fallen, and I'm having to learn what waiting on the Lord is all about... At night, going to sleep, this is my toughest time, but, praise the Lord, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

Out of true suffering,
true joy arises.
Out of pure misery,
Pure love.
Gold refined,
Purify me,
Purify me,
All of me.

Anyway, so... my point was that we as youth are growing up relating to people in different ways than our parents did, yet we need to be unified with the older, wiser generations. This starts with respecting parents, et cetera. Our dreams and emotions should be based off truth, and not feeling. I feel like there's many subcultures that are considered cool and popular that have many different components to them, including mainly just how we relate to people, but is closely related to society with all our coffeeshops and blogs and facebook accounts and whatnot. What I'm getting at is I and the rest of our generation, perhaps, should realize, first, how blessed we are as a nation, but secondly, that reality awaits us, and there's only so long we can live in our coffeeshop, emotion-based worlds.

At the same time, life is still the same, people still desire the same things, and we are just expressing ourselves in different ways, with different fun things in society to be consumed with. I think farm life might be healthy for many-a-kid living in the city. The end.

Bearing, Believing, Hoping, Enduring,
-Greg Wilson

Love Never Fails