I really need to figure out how to do a TikTok-esque day-in-the-life. I love those so much. This one turned out tragically though:
My day usually begins around 5 in the morning and ends around 10 at night. And in order for our carefully calibrated lives to reach functional productivity (is that what it’s called?) we’re supposed to cook lunch for Tuesday sometime on Monday afternoon. Only yesterday we forgot because, well, it’s the end of the school quarter and also it snowed for some reason. So somehow someone has to magically turn a package of chicken legs into something edible by noon…without the actual time in the day to do it. Maybe I’ll lay hands on the chicken and pray that God works a miracle before I go off to do the stuff that I always have to do on Tuesday morning.
On the other hand, a life of wandering around a big huge dumb building looking for the next iced-americano sounds pretty meaningless and terrible. Look at that beautiful young woman, unencumbered by social obligation or deep thought. Imagine how intolerable it would be for her to have a church community, or have to consider a life of self-sacrificing service involving the love of God and other people. How would she cope? It would literally destroy everything…at least a few seconds before the rolling layoffs. So I guess, as usual, I will forgo the dream of a personal live-in chef and go back to my regularly scheduled workday which includes the enjoyment this eye-opening thread:
The tweeter ends with this article:
The article writer writes this:
Churches are closing at rapid numbers in the US, researchers say, as congregations dwindle across the country and a younger generation of Americans abandon Christianity altogether – even as faith continues to dominate American politics. As the US adjusts to an increasingly non-religious population, thousands of churches are closing each year in the country – a figure that experts believe may have accelerated since the Covid-19 pandemic.
And then this:
“But some of the other answers are not so much logistics. One of the top answers was church members seem to be judgmental or hypocritical,” McConnell said. “And so the younger generation just doesn’t feel like they’re being accepted in a church environment or some of their choices aren’t being accepted by those at church.” About a quarter of the young adults who dropped out of church said they disagreed with their church’s stance on political and social issues, McConnell said.
And finally:
While grandparents might have been regular churchgoers, their children would say they believe in God, but not go to church regularly. By the time millennials came round, they had little experience or relationship with churchgoing or religion. In the Catholic church, in particular, the sexual abuse scandal may have driven away people who had only a tenuous connection to the faith. “The other thing is the pandemic,” Bullivant said. “A lot of people who were weakly attached, to suddenly have months of not going, they’re then thinking: ‘Well we don’t really need to go,’ or ‘We’ve found something else to do,’ or thinking: ‘It was hard enough dragging the kids along then, we really ought to start going again … next week.’”
Yes, the other thing was definitely the pandemic. But even more, as the writer points out, younger people shudder over the religious proclivities of bygone generations. They can’t even imagine the sort of life that includes not wandering around in a haze of crepes and americano. The fact that they can’t imagine it, though, is not their fault. The grandparents and parents could have helped them, when they were young, to see what a life ordered around God would be like, how rich and meaningful it might be. But those parents and grandparents didn’t, by and large, because they took prosperity and peace for granted. They thought that if they just had more fair trade coffee and more Whole Foods their hearts would literally be satisfied. So they took their little millennial children to church when it was convenient. They did not know, at any deep abiding level, that if they didn’t go and listen and grasp onto the source of Life, they would perish. They thought there would always be bigger houses and more delicious food such as they loved. In the end, it’s not just church buildings that lie empty–but also google, and amazon, and worse, the human soul.
So anyway, have a nice day–I’ve gotta go believe in God and stuff.
