January 27, 2014

Embracing My Irrelevance

I'm irrelevant.

Not young enough to be handsome anymore.
Not old enough to be considered wise.
Not credentialed enough to be considered learned.

Churches talk about being 'relevant', but all they're doing is declaring who gets to be 
relevant' to them.

Relevance is something that is bestowed by the Other; a gift given to those deemed 'worthy', 'beautiful', 'smart', or 'iconoclastic'. And if you don't fit into those groups, or pander to the relevance givers, you get ignored. Completely.


I know I'm not relevant, and I never will be. Heck, I doubt anyone will actually bother to read this. Most of the hits I get last about five seconds; just long enough to get put into the "tl;dr" category.


The saddest thing is that we put most people into the "tl;dr" category. Unless they're in our cliques, or the objects of our cause célèbre, we refuse to give people that valuable commodity of our time and our listening. 

And we all come out impoverished for it.

It's a hard thing to do these days, especially when dialogue has become little more than a no-holds-barred defense of our own certitude, as Nate Pyle has written about so well.

I've been all too guilty of the things Nate wrote about. And I despise that I've been that way.

The only thing I can think of to change it is to quit trying to be relevant to other people. Nothing I can do will ever make any of you care about me, anyway.

The only real thing I can do is to go out and make someone else relevant to me. And that means that I'll have to quit giving any relevance to the internet popularity contest. If I can't have any relevance to the people out there, then there's no reason for me to waste a millijoule of energy to any of them.

Goodbye Twitter, goodbye blog, goodbye to most of the stuff on my RSS feed. None of it gives any real relevance; it's just an entertaining distraction. Real relevance comes from Christ, and it's given to us to give to others.


No comments:

Post a Comment