Always Chasing Cool

“Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde

When my son goes to sleep, I get a few moments where I take for myself. Many of these moments involve reruns of the Simpsons (living my best life!). There is a famous episode I have watched a dozen times – quoting and laughing every time – where Homer realizes he is no longer cool. Forced to carpool his kids and their friends to school each day, he uses the time to expose them to his favorite music which leaves them unimpressed and embarrassed. Through a hilarious set of circumstances, he ends up going on tour with a traveling rock festival as part of a circus freak show while taking cannonballs to the stomach (following?). He tries so hard to be “cool” that he nearly dies and becomes another sad rock and roll cliche.

What does this have to do with us?

Many times we try to be something we are not. We want to impress others with how “with it” we are. But like the cold, dark hand of night, our cool factor gets ripped from us without warning or reason. We are not alone. This is part of our human condition. Churches and organizations around the world strive (wrongly) to be ahead – to be “cool”. Like Homer, they have yet to realize that cool is never something you can attain or keep for very long. Jesus was perhaps the perfect model for this. Many people loved Him, but many people did not. It killed Him. If His popularity would have been greater, He would have retired at an old age surrounded with wealth and a rock and roll worship band striving for relevancy.

But He didn’t.

Jesus was perfectly Himself and this lead to a better life, one of passion and life change. While never asking if He or His followers were “cool” enough, He started a movement that is still alive and where the participants are known today simply by their first names. When we strive to impress, we reject who we are and people can smell inauthenticity a mile away. Speaking as someone who can be desperate to be defined as “cool”, I get this struggle. The 30’s have taught me that it doesn’t really matter as long as you are compassionate.

What if you are enough for today? What if you are already someone of influence and substance?