I Love T-Shirts

I love T-Shirts. I have about 500 billion (ok, not that many, but that's an important number REMEMBER IT). I like them because they are comfortable, cheap, and provide a great deal of social commentary. Recently I saw one in a mall, a teenage girl was wearing it and it said in big bold all capital letter "IT'S ALL ABOUT ME". When I passed her in the mall it got me to thinking - that's really sad. It's sad for 3 reasons (there's probably more):

1. That's small thinking.
2. It's a lot of pressure having everything about you.
3. It's just not true (even though it is the growing feeling of people today and not just people but believers in Jesus).

I am tired of hearing sermons and reading books that cast man as the center of the universe. It seems that everyone has fallen into the disease of "me theology". My life is about me, my time is about me, my money, my car, my house, my stuff, my wife...it's all about me.

As I spend time reading through Scripture I don't see anywhere that it is about me. Instead, I see a whole lot of places where it's VERY not about me; it is all about God. One of the most notable places is Psalm 19.1 (ESV, it's just a better version get over it) "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork." The sky is about God, the stuff above the sky is about God. It speaks without words about the One who made them. It shows off His glory.

If you look beyond the sky and out into space I don't think anyone can help but be overwhelmed at how small we are. Some estimates say that there are over 500 BILLION galaxies out there in the heavens. We live in ONE. We live on a small planet in 1 of these 500 BILLION galaxies (told you it was an important number) . 1 out of 500,000,000,000. So 499,999,999,999 galaxies are out there, without us, declaring the glory of God and we somehow get psyched up about us and jacked up about who we are and what we've done. Does that make sense? Seems pretty insane to me.

It's good to not be lazy. It's good to work and accomplish, but when our lives become about magnifying us it gets insane. After all in the grand scheme of things we are in one galaxy of 500 billion, on one of the smaller planets in that galaxy and we are one person of approximately 6 billion on the planet. Translation: we are freaking tiny! So keep thinking magnifying us would be like putting us on a petri dish and looking at us underneath the microscope. Microscopes make small things big. Don't magnify yourself, magnify the God who made you. In order to do that you don't use a microscope, you use a telescope. They make big things smaller so we can see them. There are 500 billion galaxies out there and the universe is expanding constantly and the God who made that is bigger than that. Can you imagine the incredible pressure of developing it all, creating it all, and sustaining it all? NO, you can't even imagine it. But God does it everyday and I freak out when I have to speak a couple times a week, take some classes and cut the grass. And if that weren't enough He decides that "I love those 6 billion people on that 1 planet in that one galaxy of My 500 Billion galaxies and they need a Savior." TOTALLY BOGGLES THE MIND!

I want a t-shirt that says "it's definitely not about me" (notice no capital letters at all) it relieves the pressure, it's true, and it makes me look smart (of course it probably wouldn't sell, which would make one question about how smart it was).

Out,
jason crandall