Mediocrity

Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, once referenced what he called the "counter-intuitive phenomena of Jewish history"—a phenomena that applies to Christians as well. "When it was hard to be a Jew," Sacks wrote, "people stayed Jewish. When it was easy to be a Jew, people stopped being Jewish. Globally, this is the major Jewish problem of our time."

David Burnham was an American architect who developed the master plans for a number of cities including Chicago and downtown Washington D.C. He also designed several famous buildings in New York City and Washington D.C. During his career Burnham said:

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans. Aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our [children] and [grandchildren] are going to do things that would stagger us.

Gary Haugen, the founder of International Justice Mission, a Christian organization that frees people trapped in sex trafficking, describes God's calling to start IJM.

I vividly remember when I finally had to make a decision to abandon my career at the U.S. Department of Justice to become the first employee of a not-for-profit organization that didn't yet actually exist called International Justice Mission. I had worked for three years with friends on the idea of IJM and was very excited, in theory, about this dream of following Jesus in the work of justice in the world. But then I had to actually act. I had to walk into the Department of Justice and turn in my badge …. I tried to be very brave and very safe. That is to say, I walked in and asked my bosses for a yearlong leave of absence …. My bosses politely declined.

I was suddenly feeling very nervous …. What was I really afraid of? As I thought about it, I feared humiliation. If my little justice ministry idea didn't work, no one was going to die. If IJM turned out to be a bad idea and collapsed, my kids weren't going to starve. We'd probably just have to live with my parents for a while until I could find another job, but with my education, odds are I would soon find a job. The fact is, I would be terribly embarrassed. Having told everybody about my great idea, they would know that it was a bad idea or that I was a bad leader. Either way, it would be humiliating.

So there it was. My boundary of fear. I sensed God inviting me to an extraordinary adventure of service, but deep inside I was afraid of looking like a fool and a loser. This was actually very helpful to see, because it helped me get past it. When I am [older], do I really want to look back and say, Yeah, I sensed that God was calling me to lead a movement to bring rescue to people who desperately need an advocate in the world, but I was afraid of getting embarrassed and so I never even tried?…

Fear is normal, even among the earnest and devout, and it can be overcome. But first we must see the opportunity it provides—a revelation that only comes as we step to the precipice of action.

For more than 30 years, Gordon Mackenzie worked at Hallmark, eventually convincing the company to create a special title for him: "creative paradox." Along with challenging corporate normalcy at Hallmark, MacKenzie did a lot of creativity workshops for elementary schools. And those workshops led to a fascinating observation that he shares in his book Orbiting the Giant Hairball.

MacKenzie would ask the kids upfront: "How many artists are there in the room?" And he said the pattern of responses never varied.

In the first grade, the entire class waved their arms like maniacs. Every child was an artist. In the second grade, about half of the kids raised their hands. In the third grade, he'd get about 10 out of 30 kids. And by the time he got to the sixth grade, only 1 or 2 kids would tentatively and self-consciously raise their hands.

All the schools he went to seemed to be involved in "the suppression of creative genius." They weren't doing it on purpose, but society's goal is to make us less foolish. As MacKenzie says, "From the cradle to the grave, the pressure is on: Be normal."

After all of his research, he came to this conclusion: "My guess is that there was a time—perhaps when you were very young—when you had at least a fleeting notion of your own genius and were just waiting for some authority figure to come along and validate it for you. But none ever came."

In his book When I Relax I Feel Guilty, Tim Hansel addresses our tendency toward mediocrity:

Late in his life John Steinbeck, winner of the Nobel Prize, decided to travel around the country he loved to explore it more deeply, to enjoy it more deeply, and in the process perhaps to write of his discoveries. Interestingly enough, very few people encouraged him to go. Friend after friend reminded him …it was simply too late in his life. “And I had seen so many,” he wrote, “begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they were even encouraged by their wives and relatives, and it’s such a sweet trap.”

He knew the potential problems of driving ten or twelve thousand miles alone in a truck with only his dog. But as he said, he was not about to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. And at this point in his life, he was not about to begin trading in quality for quantity. He went. His adventures were recorded in a book called Travels with Charlie: In Search of America.

Much of it betrays the sad, cellophane age we live in, so safe and sterile, and the profound consequences of such a life (or should I say lifelessness?).

“It was all plastic too, —the table linen, the butter dish, the sugar and crackers were wrapped in cellophane, the jelly in a small plastic coffin sealed with cellophane. It was early evening and I was the only customer. Even the waitress wore a sponge apron. She wasn’t happy, but then she wasn’t unhappy. She wasn’t anything.”

On different occasions throughout the book, Steinbeck observes how insulated our society has become, and how we allow mediocrity to infuse our style of living.

Before he left, one of his friends, a well-known and highly respected political reporter (and as Steinbeck describes him, “a completely honest man”) told him, “If anywhere in your travels you come on a man with guts, mark the place. I want to go see him. I haven’t seen anything but cowardice and expediency. This used to be a nation of giants. Where have they gone? You can’t defend a nation with a board of directors. That takes men. Where are they?”

People who don't care one way or another aren't artists. Artists who "can take or leave it" don't create much art. The prerequisite for making art is passionate feeling.

Painting is never just the representation of a scene. It's a visual communication, a way we express feelings—, our passions as artists— to the viewer. If you paint without passion, your work will never transmit a mood; if you don't feel it, neither will the viewer. If you paint without feeling, you'll never express yourself; you'll never convey your vision; you won't have a vision.

Possible Preaching Angle:

When you preach, teach, serve, sing, or help others with passionate feeling, however, you create an atmosphere; you create a mood. You communicate something important and memorable to the people of God.

One interesting scene in The Passion of the Christ shows Jesus finishing a table. In it, Jesus is depicted as having a commitment to putting out an excellent product. As a carpenter, he spent many long hours and years doing manual work in a wood shop. His work had to be of the highest quality.

The Christian apologist Justin Martyr made a revealing observation about Jesus' work. During Martyr's life in second century Galilee, he saw farmers still using plows made by Jesus. Theologian Os Guinness writes: "How intriguing to think of Jesus' plow rather than his Cross—to wonder what it was that made his plows and yokes last and stand out."

As Christians we sometimes exalt "spiritual" work and downplay simple labor. However, any work, no matter how mundane, that is done for God is spiritual work.

For twenty-two years I drove the Chicago area expressways. On the Eisenhower Expressway you have six lanes going in and six lanes coming out. I often had a desire to get on top of my car, blow a whistle, and say, "Everybody stop. Let's all trade cars and stay here. Let's not just drive back and forth. Why all this?"

I felt like an ant on a great anthill. I was simply one egocentric, self-sufficient person doing my thing. I am very insignificant in relationship to the total. I'm probably less than one little sturgeon egg on the party cracker of someone eating caviar with their pinky extended. I am just one little nothing in the midst of it all. A man caught that way tends to live that way.

I fear that we in the mass media are creating such a market for mediocrity that we've diminished the incentive for excellence. We celebrate notoriety as though it were an achievement. Fame has come to mean being recognized by more people who don't know anything about you. In politics, we have encouraged the displacement of thoughtfulness by the artful cliche.

Half-heartedness and mediocrity don't inspire anybody to do anything.