Sooper

I was walking out of our local King Soopers today (It's amazing to me how I thought that name was so whack when I moved here and now it just rolls out of my brain without a second thought. Seriously, can you imagine the business meeting where the grocery store gurus were pooling their powers to come up with a name for their new store? "I think we should say something about how our store is super." "Yeah, we could call it like, Super Duper." "That is sweet Hank, but what if we were the King of all the Super stuff? That would be even more sweet." "You're right Darla, it would be nice to be the king of super stuff. And we should spell super sooper so that people elongate the ooo sound when they say it." I digress.) when I happened to notice a car with one of those signs stuck on it advertising a home business. It said, "Want to lose weight now (to which I thought, yes please)? Call me." Then it had a phone number. I happened to glance at the person sitting in the car, and it was a woman who looked to be about as overweight as I am. Now I'm not crackin on her, that would be the pot calling the kettle black (although our pots are silver, but I think the phrase refers to the pots from the olden days that they made stew and potions in), but an overweight person advertising their ability to help me lose weight doesn't really inspire a lot of confidence. Maybe that's why they still have their advertising on their car.

For those of us who follow Jesus we claim that it is a life-transforming thing. We claim that Jesus helps us through tough times and that our perspective changes and that we have purpose and meaning in life. Yet there are so many Christians who are depressed, fearful, ugly (and I don't mean that physically), rude, hateful, racist, enslaved to addictions, purposeless, and generally no different than before their "transformational" experience. (Not to go too deep into it, but I don't want to come off as saying you can't legitimately be depressed or afraid, being a Christian doesn't always mean being happy, but I think we have peace with God so we should have something in us despite going through these types of difficulties.) In the words of an author I like, "We're not smoking what we're selling." We're a bunch of overweight people claiming we can help others lose weight. No wonder so few are buying.