Aaron Proffitt

Ashlee and I saw the movie “The Box” this past Friday evening and it was a bit of a surprise movie. I won’t spoil it for any of you who are dying to go see it but it was a little different than what I had expected it to be from the previews. The point of this post is not to plug the movie…but to address something that the man with a half-burned face said. He is asked by one of the character’s why he chose to use a box for his experiment. His reply was as follows (paraphrasing of course) “why not a box? Our whole lives revolve around boxes. We live in boxes. We drive in boxes on wheels. We work in boxes. everything is done in a box.” This really got me thinking about how our minds work in relation to God sometimes…

Sammy and I were talking with a guy today about how people will blindly follow something that they don’t really feel passionate about or even believe in wholeheartedly. They will just go that direction because it’s what their parents did, or what their culture has taught them to do, or what their friends do, or maybe because they feel obligated to do. I used the word “lemmings” in our conversation and he agreed. For him, this is why he detests religion. He said “I look at these so-called religious people and I know I do more right than they do.” He was really frustrated, I could tell. There was an inner struggle going on inside him. He said that religious people follow something blindly that they don’t know anything about. Honestly, I can’t agree more with him. He is right.

Many Christians go weeks, months, and even years without opening the Bible. We follow something that we don’t really know much about much less care about. We hesitate to pray what David prayed in Psalm 25 and that is “To You O Lord, I lift up my soul. O my God, I trust in You.” Where’s the trust? Where’s the passion? What are our priorities? The more people I talk to on the campus of USF, the more I see this whole “well God is kind of important but at this point in my life I’m too busy for that” type of attitude. One student’s facebook status was brought to my attention as she said “I love Jesus…but I’m in college.” Wow! Talk about missing the point.

I hope we aren’t getting stuck in this “box” mentality where we are loving God for all the wrong reasons, which really translates into a lack of love for Him. I hope we are thinking outside the box when it comes to God and serving Him with our lives. Even if we do have to live, work, and drive in one, let’s serve God outside of our “boxes” and watch what happens.