Read an Excerpt
MORE LOST THAN FOUND
FINDING A WAY BACK TO FAITH
By Jared Herd
Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2011 Jared Howard Herd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4002-0329-1
Chapter One
TYLENOL AND DUCT TAPE LOST IN TRANSLATION
Welcome to planet Earth. It is located 93 million miles from this ball of energy we call the sun. It is one of nine planets. At least that was the count when I was in fourth grade. Apparently it is getting warmer.
The other day I was in an airport, and as I was coming off the escalator, there was a limousine driver holding a sign with "Mr. Jones" written on it. I thought about how nice that would be as I trudged through the terminal on my way to rent a car. After a ridiculously long wait in line and the attendant's incredible amount of tapping on the Hertz keyboard, I made my way to the cheapest rental they had—a foreign car with a three-stroke engine, a glorified lawn mower. If this car was short on amenities, it had less by way of reliability. Somehow, it blew a tire as I was driving it through Atlanta at one o'clock in the morning.
I found myself stranded in an unfamiliar part of town, so I was quite nervous as I waited for a tow truck. As I stood there debating whether to hide in my trunk, I thought about how nice it would have been to tell the limo driver I was Mr. Jones. He wouldn't have known. He surely hadn't met the guy before. I wondered all of this, of course, because I am sure Mr. Jones had a much different welcome to Atlanta than I did. He was probably asleep in a Hilton while I wandered a freeway looking for fragments of a tire.
Perhaps there was a time when people came into the world and a limo was waiting. They had parents who loved them and each other, a place that felt like home, and eventually a sense that they mattered and belonged. Most of us didn't arrive here that way. Maybe babies are smarter than we think. Maybe they cry because they realize they are now here and this life isn't going to be a limo ride on the way to the Hilton. More often than not, it is going to feel more like a Thunderdome journey on a six-lane freeway in a sardine-can sedan.
Preschool was the first traumatic experience of my life I can distinctly remember. My mom and I had a daily ritual. She would pull up at the preschool to drop me off, and I would cry as soon as I saw the building. When the door opened to exit the car, instead of getting out of it, I climbed into the backseat and kicked anyone who tried to make me leave the car. Every day like clockwork. School led to tears, and tears led to kicking.
We make some assumptions about how life works and what we are going to have to do to make it through. One of my earliest assumptions was that home was safe and anyplace that didn't involve my mom wasn't. As we grow up, we make more assumptions about life. Some of them are right—many of them are probably wrong—but they impact our way of viewing the world that we live in and how we think about it. As we get older, we keep doing this. The incoming freshman has a panic attack the first day of ninth grade based on assumptions. The sixteen-year-old studies hours on end with the assumption that he can control his own future. There are things we are all afraid of, mostly based on assumptions. Dating. Tests. The future. Those fears aren't by chance. They all come from assumptions.
An Incomplete History of Rap Music
As you read this, there is a tribe somewhere in a foreign land wearing tribal gear, performing a tribal ritual to appeal to tribal gods. They have no computers or cell phones. I feel it's important to tell you that I do not write that as a scholar, a world traveler, or an imperialist, but rather as someone who has seen a few episodes on the Discovery Channel. That tribe knows nothing about your life, and you likely know nothing about theirs. While all of us have our own culture, ultimately where and when we live determines how we see and look at the world. (For example, my view of life while living in America in the twenty-first century is much different from what someone would have thought about life living in Omaha in 1909—or in London in 1509. We would probably have different opinions on everything.)
It would be fascinating to get an inside look at that tribal culture. Why do they sing the songs they do? Why do they dress the way they do? Has anyone in that culture ever questioned the way things are? If they wore a pair of blue jeans would they find them to be more comfortable than loincloths? Would this spark a denim revolution and upset the tribal gods?
Chances are, no one there has ever thought about it. It's just the way things are. In the same way, we don't really think about our culture that we live in as being that fascinating; it's just the way things are. But what if we could step back and ask some questions about it?
• Why do we do what we do?
• How does what we do impact what we think?
• What does what we do say about how we think about spiritual things?
Are we confined by the same kind of old world trepidation as the distant tribe? People who follow Jesus (or any faith for that matter) in our culture are traditionally nervous when it comes to their broader culture. In our time and place, from the movies to the music to the Internet to high school campuses, if it stinks of anything contrary to our beliefs, if it has a negative label, then we should leave it alone. I even heard a preacher say that Christians are in a culture war and we need to fight in it. The preacher's assumption is that anything outside the Christian culture has nothing to add to spiritual truth. In fact, it's a cancer to the truth.
The broader culture isn't just a wasteland of sin and debasement, and if we listen closely, we may hear it telling us something. If we are all "dropped here" and make assumptions about this world, then culture is our world's way of sharing those assumptions. Culture reflects the way things are. So everything that is happening in our culture is telling us something about what is going on. Rap music, for instance, tells us something about the world we live in. Rap music is fundamentally about power. And who is it that listens? Primarily those who don't have power.
It is hard to conceive of a powerful judge or senator rattling my windows at a stoplight. So with a song and a stereo we can feel a sense of control; we embrace the illusion that we have something we really don't possess. This is why the primary market for rap music isn't successful businesspeople. And yet, rap is a hugely popular genre, especially among young people. Why would a suburban, fairly wealthy, upper-class young man or woman want to try to identify with music about violence, sexual deviation, and growing up poor? Why did this music not even exist thirty years ago?
The church might say that rap music is a problem. But is the problem really that so many people seem to identify with it? Wouldn't a distant culture look at our contemporary moment and see this as odd too? What if a teenage guy who is blaring his rap music went to church at some point and realized that he identified more with the words of a rap song than he did with the words of a pastor? Did the pastor rail against of the content of the music and never ask questions about why it is so popular and has far more influence than he does?
Somewhere in the recent past, young men and women in our culture began to make some observations about our world, and they decided that things were unfair. Rap music is about more than musical taste—it is an anthem declaring to the rest of the world how a generation feels. Rap music, whether the pastor likes it or not, isn't just selling records. It is reflecting a worldview.
An Incomplete History of Adolescence
If there had been rap music in Omaha in 1909, I don't think it would have had much of an audience. So why do so many now seem so angry? People have obviously always gotten angry. Any basic reading of the Bible tells us that. But when you look at our culture from the outside, say, if those people in Omaha then saw us now, what is normal to us would be evidence to them that something is wrong. If culture reflects the way things are, then couldn't we look at American culture, say, fifty years ago, and draw some assumptions about the way things were then? Fifty years ago, a mom and her daughter would probably dress in similar clothes. They would probably listen to very similar music. They would watch the same movies. They would, for the most part, have the same vocabulary.
You have probably noticed that now there are huge differences between your interests and your parents' interests. You don't listen to the same music. You don't wear the same clothes. Mom's jeans and a fanny pack aren't going to score many invitations to dinner. You don't even use a lot of the same words. Your parents might need a translator to understand a conversation between you and your friends. You may share a house, but you don't share much else. We don't ask a lot of questions about this. But the way things are isn't indicative of the way things were. Your America and mine is much different from our parents' America.
Perhaps we can chalk it up to the fact that things are always changing. But what if our parents turned their clocks back fifty years from their childhood? Interestingly, things weren't that much different between their parents and them. Your great-grandparents had a lot in common with your grandparents when they were in high school. The further back you go in this time line, the smaller the gap of similar experience gets.
For thousands of years, there wasn't much separation between teenage culture and everyone else in society. Actually, there wasn't really a "teenage culture" at all. People basically went from childhood to adulthood, and this thing we call "adolescence" didn't even exist. But then life spans started getting longer, and the differences between kids and parents started widening. Eventually the kids couldn't relate to the parents anymore, and youth culture was born. It is tempting to blame technology, that its rapid advances created separation, but was that really the cause? When cavemen invented the wheel, did this lead to a cave-teen rebellion? Something tells me this isn't about cell phones, Google, and iTunes. Something about the fabric of life is different.
Thousands of years ago, hundreds of years ago even, the goal of parents and grandparents was to pass along their culture to the children. Every culture had its story and worldview—who they were, why they mattered, and what the purpose of life was. The goal between generations was to transmit and preserve these values. They knew something that we probably believe but don't really experience: understanding the way things were helps us create the way things are.
Children born hundreds of years ago were born into a story, and parents made sure their children knew that story and felt a part of it. So, going to visit your grandparents was an important experience because it taught you not just who they were, it taught you about who you were too. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, all of this began to change. Culture no longer centered on getting passed down; it became about advancement in all forms—looking forward instead of looking back.
In the history books, the Industrial Revolution acts as the big marker in our cultural time line. By around 1850, Britain, America, and other industrialized countries were in full swing making locomotives, sewing machines, tanks, and funny hats. The focus shifted from transmitting culture to building railroads, textiles, steamboats, and more funny hats. To fuel the production, the population in cities exploded so that people could be close to the machines that made more machines.
Before then, there was no need to live so close to other people. On the surface, it all seemed great. Everything got faster while everyone got richer. In the meantime, because people were desperate to build and grow and make more, children were no longer at peace on the farm with the family, learning about the way things were so they could understand who they were. Instead, they went to work. They were building a new way of life in these strange centers of civilization called cities.
Interestingly, even at this point in our cultural time line, the word adolescent didn't exist. There was still the age-old transition from childhood to adulthood. Even in the nineteenth century, by age sixteen or seventeen, you had adult responsibilities and didn't spend your nights journaling in rage because somebody made fun of you at school and you didn't have a date to the prom. But soon after, seemingly all of a sudden, the sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds started to change. They didn't seem to make the transition to adulthood as smoothly as their predecessors.
Even more interesting, G. Stanley Hall, a psychologist, wrote a book in 1904 titled Adolescence. Hall noticed this problem and said there seems to be a third stage to life, between childhood and adulthood. Thus, teenage culture as we know it was born. The first rap song hadn't been written, but the seeds of change were there.
This was about a two-year process; then adolescents would become adults. But as time went on, there was no slowing down the progress of civilization, and there was no slowing down the damage that was being done to children either. There was no longer a story to be a part of. For children, the world became just a place to survive and feed the machine. The frustration of adolescence was the result. As America grew, the role of adolescence grew too. America suddenly had a lot of young men and women who didn't really know what to do with themselves.
By the 1960s, America couldn't go back on itself. Adolescence was a new constant in our culture. From one perspective, things were pretty good—prosperity and progress were the ultimate values, and there was plenty to go around. But people between ages thirteen and twenty-one didn't seem to like it. They started singing songs and holding rallies all in the name of frustration. They forged their own society, which was "anti" society. They were the children of industry and advancement, and they all shared the same sentiment—it didn't work for them. At the same time, divorces became more frequent. Family life was no longer nuclear with a mother, father, and siblings. "Family" became anyone your age who felt like you did. How did building some railroads lead to all of this?
When people don't feel like they belong anywhere, they find somewhere to belong. Adolescence became about finding somewhere to belong. Until youth felt like they belonged or mattered, they just stayed in adolescence, a transitory state of figuring things out.
A Brave New World?
If you fast-forward to today, adolescence is longer than it has ever been. People graduate from college and don't really know where they belong. Our parents still pay our cell phone bills while we struggle to make sense of it all. Humankind has always struggled with purpose, but never has there been a time such as this in which the world leaves an entire demographic on its own to make sense of it all.
Our world still revolves around progress. More than ever. And as long as it does, this problem isn't going away. Think about your own family. You probably feel a deeper sense of connectedness to your friends than your parents. You probably feel like your parents help provide certain things for you, but they aren't helping you figure out where you belong here and what really matters. The reason you are closer to your friends is that they give you a sense that you do matter and you do belong. This is true for young men and women across the board, whether they come from Christian homes, divorced homes, or atheist homes.
The gallery of people from Omaha in 1909 might think we're odd. But we don't. We just assume this is the way it is, but it shouldn't be this way.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from MORE LOST THAN FOUND by Jared Herd Copyright © 2011 by Jared Howard Herd. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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