Shut Up and Be Fantasticated

Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. For, “Whoever would love life and see good days must keep their tongue from evil and their lips from deceitful speech. They must turn from evil and do good; they must seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.” 1 Peter 3: 8-12

Loving life appears to be a rare occurrence in our prosperous and technologically abounding generation. Relationships rise and fall at a pace that leaves souls wounded, and a population longing for personal connection. The standard American answer to “how are you?”is “fine”but the word is simply a placeholder in the lexicon of responses to questions that are really rhetorical. My friend and camera man Mark Mason responds to the question of “how are you?” with a word he coined. It is “fantasticated” It indicates that he loves life and is seeing good days. In contrast my ‘terrific’ reply to “how are you” was met with “I have never been terrific” from someone who heard it. That was very sad to me. The Lord desires that all of us would “love life” and experience “good days” that we would be terrific and fantasticated.

Human beings are designed to live in community. Isolation can be a place we visit, it can even be a place of refreshing, but if you are going to love life you have to love people. The film Into the Wild chronicles the life of Christopher Johnson McCandless. He came to a tragic death in the midst of isolation. One of the last lines in the movie states that’ happiness is only real when it is shared.’ Peter is thinking about a community of people when his says “all of you.”Then he tells us what all of us should do, ‘be sympathetic and love one another, be compassionate and humble.’

Well “all of us” are not going to do that. However, those of us who are trying to do the right thing simply need to not talk about those who are not. We must “keep our tongues from evil” Part of becoming a community is model what a community should be. Most of us tend to judge ourselves based on our intentions while judging others on their actions. We make those judgments with and evil tongue. When we feel wronged or have been treated unjustly deceit can slip into our speech. We can begin to exaggerate our injury to proportions that do not have a base in reality. There are some injuries that cannot be exaggerated I understand that, however, certain types of emotional injuries leave us projecting our pain onto persons that have nothing to do with the injury. When we do that we are turning toward the evil we despise instead of to turning to God who delivers us from evil.

This is not an easy lifestyle God is calling us. It is a difficult one. We are told to “seek and pursue peace.”In other words peace has to be sought after. It is not given away. Our natural inclination is to return evil for evil. When we live this way our prayers are not answered and in fact God begins with work in opposition to us. “The Lord is against those that do evil” He is against us in our goal of retribution, “vengeance is mine says the Lord” and if you want Him to hear your prayer for a good days and you want to love life, you have to live righteously, that is defined in our verse as compassion, humility and most of all love. So shut up and be fantasticted.

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