More people seem to have been moved by Jackson since he died than when he was alive.  So what's the deal?  

But it's not just MJ.  It seems like we have a growing need to acknowledge public passages more than ever before.  Think Princess Diana. Even think Pierre Trudeau.  Sometimes the emotion surrounding a death are greater than the emotion surrounding the life we are celebrating.  

What's going on?  Why is that?  Why do we seem to be grieving more openly, more publicly and more profoundly?  Is it just me, or is the reaction to select deaths far greater than it ought to be?  Not that we shouldn't grieve Michael Jackson (he was an incredibly gifted artist).  It's just that this seems to me to be way out of proportion to how we felt about him when he was alive.

A few thoughts:

• Although God gets moved more and more to the sidelines of most people's lives, our desire to worship – the human need to worship – doesn't go away.  If we're not worshipping God, we'll create gods.  Happened then.  Is this just what it looks like now?

• A pastor I respect said that in his view, one of the biggest phenomenons of life today is that people accumulate ungrieved losses.  Life is so fast, we often ignore small losses and big losses. We lose a contract, but rather than pay attention to our feelings, we just stuff them and move on.  A distant aunt dies, we pause for a minute, but our day moves on.  We lose a job.  Lose a friend, but we keep moving.  Do events like this arrest our attention and cause disproportionate emotional responses because essentially, we're not grieving Michael nearly as much as we're grieving all the other losses that have accumulated over the months and years? I love how in the Old Testament, whenever someone died, life ground to a halt.  People mourned.  They grieved losses – whenever they occured. They went to God and each other with daily hurt.  They were emotionally and spiritually so much healthier than we are.  Over the last few years, I've tried to notice the losses in my life and process them when they happen – pray them through, sometimes shed a tear – grieve them.  It feels so much healtheir than stuffing it.  It also means when Michael Jackson dies, I'm really only feeling his loss, not a thousand other losses in my life – they've been processed before God.  And I actually wasn't that much of a fan – notwithstanding his giftedness.   

  Why are we grieving Michael Jackson so deeply?  What do you think?

There.  Finally said it.  Been wrestling with this for months now, and I finally got out the tension/struggle/principle in a single sentence.

Here's what I don't like:  I actually do struggle with wanting to defend the status quo. Which is a hard confession.  I've always thought of myself as a bit of a renegade.  Bucking trends, changing things up. Some of that is self-deception I'm sure, but there is a track record of change.

It's easy to point fingers at the establishment and say that they've fallen in love with the status quo. But what happens when that establishment is you? To a certain extent, we all represent the establishment of something.   You are the 'establishment' in your business, your ministry, your department, your shift, your family, your book club, your whatever.  And you'd basically love to perpetuate what got you there.

Connexus is eighteen months old.  I love this church.  I had a role in creating it.  But at 18 months a church ought to be transitioning.  Thinking and rethinking.  Great ideas will stick.  Bad ones will fall by the way side.  

How do you fight this tendency?  For me, it's a question of constantly exposing myself to ideas I didn't think of, view points I don't agree with, and initiatives I didn't have a hand in birthing.  The more I am open to the contributions of others that are forward thinking and innovative, the less I will tend to defend the status quo.  I also find that the older I get, the more ideas from younger leaders seem 'weird' to me, which means (guess what), I might be shoring up the status quo.  Gotta stop that.  Now.

In what ways are you defending practices that are a window to the past, to the way things were done, not to the future and the way things ought to be done for emerging generations?