Today’s site prompt (the hosting website asks a question every day, to spur thought and encourage me to post every day) is “What’s one thing you would change about yourself?” On one hand, I don’t like this question. It sounds like a wish in a well, like ‘I’d like to be taller,’ or to be able to fly, or whatever. But on the other, maybe this is a doorway into something deeper. In a mass email I received last week, a man named Mark asked if we were becoming the sorts of people we want to become, and that sounds like a variation of the variation of the same question I ask most Sundays. If our answer is a catalyst towards entering a new phase of growth, maybe it’s a good one. Instead of wishing to be a superhero, what if the one thing is to love our neighbor in ways they understand, or to show up to our spouses more often, and asking is the first step in actually doing it, that’s a different story, isn’t it?

This reminds me of a book I just read, Girlfriend In A Coma, by Douglas Coupland. It’s a good book that I read in college, because I have always liked Coupland (he wrote the impossibly important novel Generation X, where the term was first coined), AND because it’s titled after a fantastic Smiths song. A good book, but not life-changing, then. Now might be a different story.

The end has all of the main characters standing in an apocalyptic wasteland, they are the only survivors, and they have a decision. They can stay where they are (which isn’t at all as terrible as it sounds, for one HUGE reason that I won’t spoil) or go back to before the “apocalypse.” They choose to go back, deciding to use this new time, these new lives, to effect change.

Listen to this: “You guys just wait and see. We’ll stand taller than these mountains. We’ll bare open our hearts for the world to grab. We’ll see lights where before there was dimness. We’ll testify together to what we have seen and felt…Our hearts will shine brightly.”

“How can I give them a spark? He wonders. How can I hold their hands and pull them all through flames and rock walls and icebergs?…Every cell in our body explodes with the truth…We’ll be begging passersby to see the need to question and question and never stop questioning until the world stops spinning. We’ll be adults who smash the tired, exhausted system. We’ll crawl and chew and dig our way into a radical new world.“

Right??? I’m typing with tears in my eyes for 2 reasons. First, the thing they had to give up was so humongous, the cost was so high, it absolutely crushes my heart. But the second is the hope of their choice and their opportunity. Now, obviously, it sounds like they’re the ones who will “fix it,” who will “stand taller than mountains,” whose strength and significance is great enough to rewrite the future. I don’t believe that. Jesus fixes (fixed) it, Jesus stands taller than all mountains stacked up, His strength & significance is more than enough to rewrite the past, present, and future, forever and ever, amen.

However, I think this grandiosity isn’t always our problem. More often, we have far too little regard for our own participation. We simply don’t think we have a part to play in changing anything. We believe we’re a pebble thrown into the ocean.

This book (and all of the art that really moves us) presents a different narrative – that we can “testify to what we’ve seen and felt,” that we can let our hearts “shine brightly,” that we can give a spark, we can hold hands and pull, we can smash this tired, exhausted, hopeless system through our faith and hope in Our Savior, and in so doing, we can have a “radical new world.” What we do matters, and it matters a lot.

It doesn’t matter if the prompt is a good one. What’s important is that we keep asking, keep pushing, keep holding, keep crawling, keep shining, keep testifying. Every cell in our body explodes with the Truth, we just have to let that explosion out.