Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Jurassic World.
Every Marvel character times 100.
Fuller House.
Gilmore Girls remake.
The X Files are reopened.
The list is expanding by the hour. As a people, we are crying out for things that pander to our nostalgia. We want to sit back, for an hour, and remember an easier time. Even if that involves raising Bob Saget from the career dead.
I'm not saying this nostalgic yearning is a bad thing. It's fun to be reminded of how stinkin hot John Stamos is things that hold fond memories for us of places, people, and childhoods gone by.
But we have been played. Individuals have come along and taken our nostalgic desires and used it against us. They have cherry-picked screenshots of our memories and told us that the past is where it's at.
Let's make America great again.
Again.
Like it was perfect then. Like we were a thirty-minute sitcom with an annoying laugh track (For the love, how is it humanly possible to laugh after every single thing a person says?)
I could fill up a Netflix reboot with happy times from my childhood, from my teenage years, from my college years. I could pretend those were the only memories that exist for me.
But they aren't.
I was introduced to sin. I was introduced to cruelty. I was introduced to suffering.
But more than anything, I was introduced to a God who was bigger than the cheesy recurring catchphrases of my story; who was bigger than the few story lines I wanted to keep; who was bigger than my past.
Social media and a 24-hour news cycle have created the false impression that things have just recently gone awry. But nothing could be farther from the truth.
While you were watching Michelle Tanner preciously quip, "You got it dude," there was domestic violence, racial inequality, and struggling families not 5 miles away from you.
You may have been watching dinosaurs chomp down victims in Jurassic Park, but that doesn't mean that simultaneously crooked politicians and a broken system weren't closing their powerful jaws on people who so desperately needed their help.
Nostalgia is a yearning. But we can't let that yearning cripple us from looking forward and striving to be better.
I may be alone here, but I don't want the America of yesterday. The America of "again." I don't want the America where women and children are expected to silently suffer at the hands of abusers; where churches get to decide who is worthy of God's love and acceptance; where people can be cast out based on nothing but race, ethnicity or socio-economic levels beyond their control.
I don't want the America that only tries to relive the good times. I don't want the America that ignores the ugly parts or denies that they even happened.
Perhaps what scares me most of all is that - in the back of my head and heart- I know that for some people, this complacency in ignorance is what made America great back then. They miss not being expected to be better. They miss not being expected to change.
But the Bible is filled to the brim with evolving stories and evolving people. In 1 Corinthians, Paul says,
"When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up my childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love."
It's time to stop thinking like children. It's time to stop reasoning like children. It's time to give up our childish ways.
Let's contain the nostalgia to Uncle Jessie Netflix, shall we?
