Okay, enough with the pink.
I’m sorry, y’all, but I’m glad October is almost over. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that every year for the month of October we’re all inundated with the color pink for breast cancer awareness.
Football players wear pink socks. Cheerleaders use pink pom-poms. Employees wear pink to workplaces that have the pink ribbon symbols everywhere. Tijuana Flats sells pink tacos. I drove through College Park the other day and the freakin’ crosswalks were painted pink.
I’m sure at one point, it meant something. I’m sure to some people it still does. But by and large it just seems, well, trendy. And I know people who have survived breast cancer, are currently fighting breast cancer or have lost someone to breast cancer who are pretty annoyed by it.
‘Raising awareness’ is something we hear a lot these days. And to be sure, there are infinite crises in the world that should be looked at and addressed. Raising awareness is not a bad thing.
The problem comes when we stop with awareness, when we pat ourselves on the back for learning new information and convince ourselves that we’ve done our part just because we know a little more.
And I’m just as guilty of this as anyone.
I don’t get into the pink during October, but I’m a voracious reader all year long. I read everything. And I don’t mean beautiful, creative fiction that gives my weary brain a rest from reality. I’m talkin’ non-fiction. Books, magazines, online articles. Information. Inspiration. Improvement.
I’ve been like this for years. When I was getting married the first time, I read a ton of marriage books. Then when I was pregnant, I read a zillion pregnancy books. And of course after Caroline was born, I began collecting parenting books.
As my first marriage began to suffer, I read books on how to save it. When that didn’t work and I got divorced, I became temporarily disillusioned with my philosophy that reading enough, learning enough, knowing enough can fix anything. And I stopped reading.
Then Brad came along, I reverted back to my previous modus operandi and read everything I could find on second marriages, step-parenting and blending families. And like most new marriages, our first few years were challenging so I bought more books on relationships, psychology and self-improvement.
Then one day, everything changed.
I was driving home from someplace, turning my problems over and over in my head, thinking about what else I could learn to fix myself and everything else in my life, and God interrupted. I felt like He put His giant hand on my head like He literally wanted to stop my brain from throbbing and whispered,
Stop, My child. Just stop. Stop trying to learn everything. Stop striving. Stop looking for all the answers to all your issues in this world. I AM the answer. All of this information is just wearing you out. Rest. Rest in Me. Abide with Me. And let’s just BE for a little while.
My eyes filled with tears of exhaustion and relief. And as soon as I walked in the door of my house, I marched up to my room and got to work.
Brad walked in a few minutes later to find our bed covered in dozens and dozens of books. I dumped another armload onto the pile and looked up a his concerned face. “Uhh, whatcha doin’?” he asked nervously.
“I’m putting these away for a while,” I informed him as I placed a handful of books into a shopping bag. “They haven’t fixed anything and they’re making me tired. I’m just…taking a break.” I ended up with five or six bags full of ideas, principles, answers and philosophies and tucked them carefully in the back of my closet.
There was nothing wrong with those books. I loved (and still love) those books and have recommended many to friends and family. But I had made them into more than they were. They weren’t going to save me. And my frantic search for more information had left me discouraged and defeated.
I had all the awareness. Too much awareness, in fact. Based on the amount of research I had done and data I had collected, I should have been a completely whole and healed person, the perfect wife, a phenomenal mother, a stepmother worth bragging about, not to mention completely equipped to fix any problem that belonged to any person who crossed my path.
But awareness without action changes nothing. Awareness without action can actually do more harm than good. Because if you have all this information about a problem, all these negative statistics, all these horrible situations floating around in your head and do nothing with them, you can become paralyzed, overwhelmed and helpless. Score one for the other team.
Taking action after gaining awareness puts that angst to work, which protects your sanity/morale and more importantly, brings the Kingdom.
I was reading Acts the other day and came across a very convicting verse. Background story: Paul is traveling around talking about Jesus. He ends up in Athens, Greece where the air is thick with philosophies and ideas. He starts preaching to some of the big-dog intellectuals and they are intrigued because he’s saying stuff they’ve never heard before. He gets his opening, and takes it.
But the verse that struck me is Acts 17:21, which is actually in parentheses. It says, “(All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)”
Ouch.
We live in a world that is completely saturated with ideas, thanks to this little thing called the internet. We have unlimited up-to-the-minute information at our fingertips 24 hours a day. We no longer have to wait for the newspaper to show up on our doorstep in the morning, or for the evening news to come on. We can know anything any time. We are not hurting in the area of awareness.
And we spend plenty of time talking about and listening to the latest ideas. I grew up amid regular discussions of politics and current events. I seem to have landed in another home with another man always ready for a lively debate on social issues. There are blogs, Facebook posts, comment sections for online articles that provide ample opportunity to share our opinions with large audiences.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve slipped into the habit of spending my time ‘doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.’
Pinterest is probably one of the more harmless of the social media outlets. No, I take that back. Pinterest can totally make me question my worth as a woman if I get caught up in all the recipes and birthday party ideas and compare them to my real life. Yeah, okay, there’s nothing harmless about it.
I avoided Pinterest for a while and finally caved to the pressure. I stay away from the party ideas because I just don’t think my ego can take it. But I love all the dip recipes, T-shirts and funny memes.
Something that never fails to crack me up is the list of ‘Pinterest fails.’ It shows a perfectly executed and styled recipe, obviously done by professionals (you know, what it’s SUPPOSED to look like). Then right next to it, it shows a picture of the average-Joanne attempt to replicate it, which of course looks nothing like its beautiful counterpart. And under each well-attempted disaster are the words ‘Nailed it.’ It’s hilarious.
But you know what? I gotta give props to those ladies who went for it and bombed. They took the awareness of an idea and put it to action. I’m too intimidated to even try. Way to go, girls. Your little hedgehog cake may have haunted me in my nightmares, but you get an A for effort.
Some particularly powerful song lyrics for me right now are from Matthew West’s song called Do Something:
I woke up this morning, saw a world full of trouble now
Thought, “How’d we ever get so far down? How’s it ever gonna turn around?”
So I turned my eyes to Heaven. I thought, “God, why don’t You do something?”
Well I just couldn’t bear the thought of people living in poverty,
Children sold into slavery, the thought disgusted me.
So I shook my fist at Heaven and said, “God, why don’t You do something?”
He said, “I did; I created YOU.”
Drop mic.
Awareness without action is worthless. Faith without works is dead (James 2:26).
So wear the pink, if you must. Wear it to the hospital while you visit some cancer patients who are having the poison of chemotherapy dripped into their veins, hoping that the cancer dies before they do.
Talk about the horrific statistics of sex trafficking as you and your friends gather clothes to donate and purchase cleaning supplies for a home for recovering victims.
Learn about homelessness and poverty, not from a book, but from the mouth of a person who lives it every day as you share a fast-food meal on the sidewalk.
I need to close the gap in time between becoming aware of a problem and taking action to help solve it. The longer I pause between learning and doing, the greater the danger of either feeling powerless to help (“It’s hopeless and I can’t do anything”) or prideful for just knowing more (“I’m awesome for knowing and I don’t need to do anything else”).
Hopefully someday my immediate response to learning something new will be, “Now what does God want me to do with this?” And then do it. What a powerful way to live.
Almost like He designed it that way or something.
