The wind blows and the grass sways. “Do not conform” is a difficult advise in a generation when crowd pressure have unconsciously conditioned our minds and feet, urging us to choose the route of less resistance, and bid us never to fight for an unpopular cause and never to be found in a minority of two or three. The security of being identified with the majority has unknowingly become an adage of the modern world for success, recognition and conformity.
Mitch Albom says this, “…the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We're teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. Create your own.” Reading this line, I wonder where do I stand in the culture I live and it would seems like a tension of opposites, like the pull of the rubber band, and I dwell somewhere in the middle. We as Christians have a mandate to be nonconformists as we entrenched and embedded ourselves in the world. We have the imperative in us to live differently towards a higher loyalty; person of conviction, not conformity; of moral nobility; not social respectability. And every true Christian is a citizen of two worlds, the world of time and the world of eternity. We are in the world and yet, not of the world; a colony of heaven as described by Paul the apostle. Longfellow said, “In this world, a man must either be the anvil or the hammer.” A molder of the society or is molded by society. And who would differ that today most men are anvils and shaped by the majority; like the grass swaying to where the wind blows.
“Most people, and Christians in particular, are thermometers that record or register the temperature of majority opinion, not thermostats that transform and regulate the temperature of society.” – Martin Luther King, jr. Many people fear nothing more to take a position, which stands out sharply, and prevailing opinion; a city that is set on the hill and can never be hidden. Have we like Pilate, yielded our convictions to the demands of the crowd? Have we been tempted by the enticing cult of conformity? Or have we been seduced by the success symbols of the world. Not a few men, who cherish lofty and noble ideals, hide them under a blanket of fear for fear of being called different. “ Be not conformed to this world: but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” seems like words of yesterday. Where do righteousness, principles and character have a place in the culture that we live?
And I was reading articles telling how the early Christians captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ. Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune, and life for a cause they knew to be right. They were nonconformists in the truest sense of word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane pattern of the world. Quantitatively small, they were qualitatively giants. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who, when ordered by King Nebuchadnezzar to bow before a golden image, said in unequivocal terms, ”If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us… But if not… we will not serve other gods’.
We must make a choice. Ultimately though personality opens up doors, but it is really our character that keeps those doors ajar.
Anyway a food for thought.
