A Dead Horse – Utopia

An article by Don Quixote    3 Comments

The saying goes, “There’s no use beating a dead horse.” The problem is we assume any horse that doesn’t move because of our beating must be dead. Sometimes it just needs more encouragement.

I feel like some days I’m just saying the same things over and over again because no one is getting it. I feel like I am up against a brick wall and the only way through is the repeated pounding of my forehead.

Everyone has their soap box, everyone has their pet-peeves, everyone has their cause, their solutions, their answers to all the world’s problems, and I guess I’m no different (except of course that mine is right).

We all want our Utopia, where the world is perfect as we see it. I am a Dime Store Prophet selling my view along with everyone else.

To me, life shouldn’t be that complicated. The church shouldn’t be that complicated. That somehow if we could all just stop and listen, we’d see how simple things really are.

The Building of my Utopia

The foundation is love. Some might argue, that no, you’re wrong, the foundation needs to be truth, or something else. To them I say, “Go away, this is my Utopia, go build your own.” Love is the key to everything. From it, you can bring truth, you can bring healing, you can bring restoration, you can do anything. In my opinion the greatest issue facing the modern day church is its lack of love. It tries to do a lot of good and right things, but it’s motivation is all wrong. Many ministers and church leaders are motivated by ego, power, over inflated self-righteousness, and personal vendettas. Religion is nothing more than their club to swing at the masses and lift themselves up, while the entire time they are rotten on the inside. Love. Love. Love. Love. The gospel in a word is love…

My grass is understanding and open-mindedness (it feels great to walk in barefooted). The second biggest issue I have with the church (and most of this comes from my church background) is this pig-headed belief that they are right about everything. This concept comes mostly from the minister (whose egos are so big they had to make double doors in the first place) but it’s pretty common among the church in general. We are completely closed off to the idea that someone else might be right. How vain have we become, when we honestly believe that our interpretation is the only one? If we just open our minds slightly and understand the views of someone else, we might come to a different or truer understanding than we might have on our own. Plant your feet on a solid stance, but don’t cement them in place. Even people who are wrong are still your brothers.

Flowers of joy and happiness dot the landscape. Aside from lacking love, the church today has lost a lot of it’s joy and happiness. Christians seem so angry some times. They are mad at the world, mad at one group or another. They have their panties (oh and you can be your bippy they aren’t thongs) so far up their butts that they have this permanent scowl on their faces. Man, if I were a non-Christian I’d be dying to get my hands on that kind of joy. Where did the joy go? Why do we no longer enjoy living, let along living as a Christian? I though Jesus said he had come to give us life and life to the full? I miss the smile on their faces, I miss the song in their hearts, the spring in their steps.

Man there would be a lot of trees. Strong oaks of compassion with arms you could climb in and get lost. Willows of knowledge, blue spruce of humor, maples of wisdom that flow sweet in the fall. Pools of peace, clouds of hope, and the sun would shine warm in the day, and breeze would bring healing in the night.

When you stumbled, you would land on that grass of understanding, you could pull yourself up on the trucks of compassion, you could wash yourself in peace, and everything would flow from the heart of love upon which it was built.

In the end, we are all human. We are all frail, we are all broken, battered and bruised. We are all striving up the mountain to become more Christ like. We all hate sin, and yet we all stumble upon, we all harbor darkness in our inward places. We all have false motives, we all get mad, we all have our own agendas.

And I would like to believe that we all in our hearts want to do the right thing.

We just forget to be loving, understanding, forgiving and patient. We forget what it feels like to hurt and fall. We forget to be open and bending. We forget who we are, what we are, and what we are trying to be.

Well all need to be reminded.

Stop being so hard, relax you’re too tense. You catch more flies with honey. Stop and smell the roses, breath. Smile, it might do your face good, it might do your heart good.

(An aside: The picture of the Intellivision game is of Utopia, one of my all time favorite Intellivision games [next to Tron and AD & D], the third picture had a butt in there so I included because my sister April said I had to stop posting nude pictures on my blog, so April, that one’s for you)