"...cowards fleeing before a relovution..."

Last night I went to chapel instead of doing my paper (just like I'm writing this instead of doing the same paper) and it was packed full of people. I know we were breaking fire codes. All the pews were full and the people were jammed into the aisles, practically standing on each other. This in of itself was amazing and heartwarming. But then I actually noticed the people. There was this amazing worship service going on and there were so many people talking on their cell phones, giggling to each other, kissing their boyfriends in the back corners, doing everything but what we were there for. There were so many people who were there to worship, but the effect was diminished. I was standing just inside and to the left of one of the side doors so that more people could get in. and so many people would just walk in and stand there, right in front of the door and no see me or the others that were close by. They just stood there and talked until someone else tried to come in through that door and there was no place for them to go. This happened three or four times, I mean it's just dumb to stand in from of the door in a jam-packed room with more people coming in and then get upset because you are stuck. I would have rather people just swiped their card to get credit and left. Which a lot of people did. There were people who piled their stuff onto the pews around them so no one could sit down with them. People were sitting on the floor, some places they couldn't sit because there wasn't enough room and here were these girls with purses and backpacks piled around them taking up 6 or 7 extra seats.

Are we so consumed by our culture that our beliefs, the very things that make us different, don't matter? Are we so blinded by the world that we don't even see our brothers and sisters in Christ? How can we be the Body if we ignore the feet or the hands, or even the heart? We can't. This selfishness, this apathy, this willful blindness gets us nowhere but farther away from God. Our relationships with God have become so personalized and so relativized that we have forgotten the reason we are Christians. We are the salt of the earth and we have lost our saltiness. We are the light of the world and we hide our candles so that no one can judge us. We have ceased to encourage each other, to pray earnestly for one another, to seek after God with heartfelt abandon. We have ceased to stand firm in our beliefs, and be open, loud and truthful about our faith. Instead we are divided, judgmental, and feel very much judged by not just the world but by our own people.

"And we must accept in the highest mind the same transcended destiny. Not pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution; but redeemers and benefactors. Pious aspirants to be noble clay plastics before the Almighty effort. Let us advance and advance on the chaos and the dark!" - Emerson